Arie Luyendyk Jr. is not happy with the way his breakup with Becca Kufrin went down on TV. In a new interview, the former Bachelor revealed he was really hurt by ABC producers when the breakup aired, as they had allegedly convinced him it would make him look better and show America that he’s looking for true love.
“We can show you going back to Lauren [Burnham], and people are going to rally behind you because you took this big risk and you did it for love,'” the race car driver, 36, told GQ magazine, claiming what producers told him at the time. “At the end of the day, people will just want to see you happy.”
A month after proposing to Kufrin, 28, on The Bachelor finale, Luyendyk. Jr. realized he missed Burnham and reached out to her. After telling producers he needed to end things with his then-fiancée, they urged him to have the cameras come film it.
He reiterated in the new interview that he looked at the producers and crew he had just spent months with as his “friends” whom he trusted. Now, he feels “100 percent” betrayed. When the breakup aired and was promoted as completely unedited, Luyendyk Jr. wasn’t shown in a good light. In fact, after breaking up with her, he wouldn’t leave her place — something that confused audiences when it aired.
“It was completely edited. I was told to stay on that couch. I tried to leave, and then production was like, ‘You need to go back inside. She’s finally calming down. I feel like you owe it to her to have this conversation.’ So then I went back in the house,” he said, adding that production kept talking him into staying. Calling the footage unedited “was super unfair to me,” he reiterated.
He also added that the backlash does come as a surprise to him, as he thinks it has a positive outcome for all. “Everyone ended up getting closure and also an opportunity to be with the person that they were really meant to be with,” he said. “I don’t understand why I’m the fall guy for filming the breakup on a television show which we all signed up to be on.”
Kufrin is now engaged to one of the men she met on The Bachelorette, which premiered Monday, May 28. Luyendyk Jr. says she wouldn’t have had that opportunity if he hadn’t filmed the breakup because “people wouldn’t be able to cope with the fact that she just got broken up with on television.”
The Bachelorette airs on ABC Mondays at 8 p.m. ET
