Season 3 of Too Hot to Handle just dropped on Netflix, but Gerrie Labuschagne already has a messy past with another reality star: Whitney Williams.
The Big Brother season 23 alum exclusively told Us Weekly about her past relationship with Gerrie, whom she met in 2020 when he reached out to her via TikTok.
“I had posted a video being, like, ‘This is why I’m single. I’m an entrepreneur, I have high expectations and I’m a single mom,’” Whitney, who has two sons, told Us. “He saw that and reached out to me and then we talked — sometimes we would talk on the phone for 12 hours a day or be on FaceTime, like, we would just set the phone down and do chores while we’re on the phone together. We’d fall asleep on the phone together. … Now I feel like it was all bulls—t.”
For the majority of their nearly two-year relationship, Gerrie, a rugby player, was living in Japan. According to Whitney — and photos and videos she shared of their relationship via TikTok — he sent her a ring and spoke to her sons — now 8 and 5 years old — about marrying her.
“He proposed to me in November [2020],” she told Us. “We broke up, like, a couple of weeks after that and then he started filming Too Hot to Handle about a month after that.”
While Whitney knew Gerrie had reality TV aspirations — he told her he was supposed to film a show called Beyond Parties of Paradise (which was the title used to mislead season 3 Too Hot to Handle contestants) when they initially connected — she was blindsided when he left to film.
“After we broke up, he called me on his birthday and he was like, ‘I’m really depressed,’” she told Us, noting that she worried about Gerrie’s mental health after he “dropped off the face of the earth” in January 2021. “I thought something was wrong. … I messaged two of his guy friends and they completely ignored my messages, so then I reached out to one of his girl friends that I know and asked her the same thing. She was like, ‘Whitney, I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this, he’s gone filming that show that he told us all about. I don’t think he’ll be back for another month or so.’”
According to Whitney, Gerrie FaceTimed her in February 2021 just after he wrapped the Netflix show.
“He was, like, in his bathtub, and he just wrapped up filming and a girl walked in the room, and I heard a girl’s voice and he got this, like, panicked look on his face,” she claimed. “He hung up the phone really quick.”
After more back-and-forth — and Whitney’s stint on season 23 of Big Brother during summer 2021 — the twosome called it quits for good in November 2021 when she saw footage of Gerrie partying in his native South Africa. Looking back, she feels like he misled her.
“He got me. He love bombed the s—t out of me. He said all the things that I wanted to hear because I was a single mom,” she told Us. “I saw his episode on Too Hot to Handle where he was like, ‘I know how I’m gonna get her attention, this is how I get all the ladies interested in me.’ He’s like, ‘I really want to have a family, I can’t wait to settle down.’ And that’s absolutely what he did with me. I’d been single for four years at that point — my ex left me when I was eight months pregnant. Hearing somebody tell me all these wonderful things in and this, like, extravagant lifestyle and story and, like, these things that we could potentially have together, I just fell for it immediately. I felt like it was love bombing and he was just lying and saying all the right things to get me to be interested in him.”
Us Weekly reached out to Gerrie for comment.
