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Blake Moynes Recalls Being ‘Distraught’ When Clare Crawley Left With Dale Moss: ‘I Started Stress Balding’ (Exclusive)

Clare Crawley’s early Bachelorette exit wasn’t just stressful for producers. Blake Moynes got candid about the OG lead’s decision to leave the series with Dale Moss during an exclusive interview with Us Weekly.

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“I was shocked [when they left together]. You saw me, I was distraught. I was literally, like, ‘What is going on?’ I couldn’t believe it because of the timeframe,” the 30-year-old contestant told Us. “Nothing made sense to me. Now it does. But at the time, I was literally shook. I was distraught. was I started stress balding in the shower because I didn’t know that was going on.”

News broke in early August that Clare, 39, stopped filming season 16 of the series because she was in love with Dale, 32, after less than two weeks of filming. Fans watched him pop the question during a November episode.

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“They look like they’re absolutely crushing it. So, you know, if I’m basing it just off of that, then I think they’re going to make it,” Blake told Us about the pair. “They connected hard. You saw on the show, too. I didn’t know that [at the time] and it all makes sense now. And the thing is she deserves it. So, you gotta believe in it with them. He’s a really good dude. And he’s living up to everything right now. And he’s proving a lot of people wrong. And at the beginning, he was proving me wrong too. And now I’m fully on their side, hoping for the best for them.”

Blake Moynes Started Stress Balding When Clare Left With Dale
Blake Moynes, Dale Moss and Clare Crawley. ABC; ABC/Craig Sjodin

ABC subsequently called in Tayshia Adams to take over for Clare with the remaining 16 suitors and four additional contestants. Blake was sent home by the 30-year-old Bachelor in Paradise alum during the Monday, December 14, episode. While he told Us that he doesn’t totally feel closure with Tayshia, he had no choice but to move on from Clare “because it ended so abruptly.”

He explained: “It was easy to just be like, ‘OK, fair enough.’ If it’s that easy for you to say, ‘See ya,’ like, it’s easy for me to be like, ‘I’m not wasting another thought on this.’ And that’s not a mean way at all. Things happen the way they did. She fell in love hard. And you know, she broke it off, like, too bad for us. It is what it is.”

Blake added that he got closure by contacting Clare post-filming.

“I just reached out and said to her, ‘Listen, you know, I know that through that episode, it looked like I was so against you guys, but at that time I had no idea that you guys hit it off the way you did.’ And now I’m watching it back and, like, I look like an idiot because I just thought there was no way and, you know, they’re making it very clear that there is a way and I’m so happy for them because it looks like they’re really taking off.”

Related: ‘Bachelorette’ Season 16 Scorecard

Tayshia, for her part, is down to three men — Zac Clark, Ivan Hall and Brendan Morais.

“I felt like going into the final four, she really liked Brendan the most, but did Brendan make the most sense for her? I don’t know. Zac seemed the most, like, there for the fully right thing,” Blake told Us. “He didn’t really have an Instagram presence at all, like, [he] just seemed like he was truly there for the right thing, very life-experienced, like a man. … Every time Zac spoke, it was a completely different perspective from, like, such a mature viewpoint. I got that from a lot of the guys, but every time Zac spoke — it wasn’t all the time — but when he did, it was meaningful.”

The Bachelorette concludes on Monday, December 21, and Tuesday, December 22, on ABC at 8 p.m. ET.

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