Clare Crawley is not here for the criticism. The season 16 Bachelorette responded to the backlash surrounding the show’s strip dodgeball date — and implied it wasn’t her idea to begin with.
“It’s awful you had the guys take off their clothes,” a viewer tweeted at the 39-year-old hairstylist on Sunday, October 25, referring to the group date from the October 20 episode of the ABC series. “If The bachelor asked the women do the same things all heck would break loose. You were wrong. Juan Pablo should have had you strip.”
Crawley fired back on Monday, October 26, with a topless photo of Andi Dorfman and Lucy Aragon from season 18 of The Bachelor.
“You mean like this?” she wrote alongside the pic of a naked Juan Pablo Galavis posing with two of his contestants for charity during the 2014 season. (While Crawley finished as the runner-up on Galavis’ season, she wasn’t on the aforementioned group date.)
Crawley also “liked” a tweet about the controversy, which read, “Hmmmm it’s almost like making contestants take their clothes off is a really tired production trick and wasn’t your idea at all.”
ABC named the Sacramento, California, resident the season 16 lead in March. After months of waiting to film amid the coronavirus pandemic, news broke in August that Crawley stopped shooting the show because she was already in love with one of her suitors. While the network has yet to publicly comment, Crawley recently “liked” a series of tweets suggesting that she was pushed out of the role so Tayshia Adams could take over.
“I really feel like they are giving her a bad edit (just my opinion). They are feeding into the narrative and the rumors and making it seem like it was Clare’s decision that this ended and I feel like that’s not the case,” the social media user wrote. “They had Tayshia quarantined 9 days after Clare started filming. They wanted to remove Clare. And I just don’t think it’s fair. … Don’t you see with how the last two episodes have been produced, there’s no drama and the drama that they’ve shown has been dramatized and fixated to make Clare look a certain type of way.”
Crawley approved of another post that denied she spoke to frontrunner Dale Moss before filming began.
“The rumours of them talking before hand are false I rather believe Clare and Dale’s sister when they said they was no contact,” a tweet “liked” by Crawley read. “Im hoping they are together because they are both great together.”
The Bachelorette airs on ABC Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
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