Just a figure of speech? Chris Harrison reached out to Kelley Flanagan after she claimed she was locked in a closet while filming Peter Weber’s season of The Bachelor.
“I said, ‘What was that? We don’t lock people in closets, so clearly you weren’t locked in a closet for three hours. What did you mean?’” the 48-year-old host recalled to Entertainment Tonight about his recent phone call with Flanagan, 28. “What she meant by that was she was frustrated. She’s a smart girl who I think is used to getting what she wants, and she didn’t get that time with Peter.”
Flanagan opened up about her time on the ABC dating series during an interview with Weber on Ben Higgins and Ashely Iaconetti on the “Almost Famous” podcast on Tuesday, April 7.
“The first couple of weeks I saw him look at me differently compared to when we got on our one-on-one and I could tell a hundred percent that like producers were in his head,” the lawyer claimed. “Because on the one-on-one, nothing happened between us but he had this, like, demeanor toward me that was so pissed off and I was looking at him, like, ‘What the hell were you told?’ because nothing happened here for you to have this attitude. And so right then and there, I knew something was going on behind the scenes, and I was like, ‘This is bulls–t.’”
While Flanagan alleged that producers “locked [her] up in a closet for three hours” and wouldn’t let her “see” Weber, Harrison believes she was referring to filming her interviews for the show in Cleveland.
“You’re not in a closet. It’s in a room, and sometimes it takes hours,” he told ET. “It depends on what’s going on at the time … I think Kelley was frustrated at the time, and that’s how she articulated that.”
Harrison added that Flanagan apologized.
“She said, ‘That was not what I meant to say.’ She’s like, ‘I’m so sorry that it came out that I was locked in a closet,'” he explained. “So everybody, it’s OK. Kelly was not locked in a closet, she’s safe and she’s good, and she apologized and I laughed it off. I was like, ‘I get it, I knew what you were trying to say.’ … She didn’t even know that she was part of the interview at that point.”
Flanagan and Weber, who are currently quarantined together in Chicago, reunited two weeks after the finale aired. Harrison told Us Weekly exclusively that he wasn’t surprised that they reconnected after the show.
“I think The Bachelor may have been a bad place for Kelley to be,” he told Us. “She just wasn’t a good fit — not that she’s a bad person. She’s smart, she’s beautiful, she’s all those things. It just wasn’t a good fit for her, I think maybe them quarantining together might be a better environment.”
