The end was only her beginning. Jessica Carroll didn’t think that her Bachelor journey wold end on night one — she thought she “was going to be getting many roses.”
Arie Luyendyk Jr. may have eliminated Carroll on the Monday, January 1, season 22 premiere of The Bachelor, but the 27-year-old TV host is making the most out of the opportunity. The media personality opened up about her short-lived time on ABC’s reality dating series and revealed how her father met 36-year-old Luyendyk during an exclusive interview with Us Weekly.
“When I found out Arie was the Bachelor, I saw it as a sign because Dad had met Arie a few times,” Carroll told Us on Tuesday, January 2, noting that her late father met the real estate agent before he competed on Emily Maynard’s Bachelorette season. “My dad collects vintage cars and Arie was at the Barret-Jackson Car Auction in Scottsdale, where Arie’s from, and so my dad was there buying some cars and met Arie. My mom was actually hosting the fashion show at the Barret-Jackson Car Auction and actually brought Arie on stage to walk the runway.”
Her family have been fans of the race car driver ever since the encounter. “The best part of all is that, when my dad was very ill, it was actually Arie’s season of The Bachelorette, where Dad was really rooting for Arie and I just remember Dad being in the hospital dying of cancer, yet we would use The Bachelorette and rooting for Arie as a distraction from the tubes up his nose and all of the other stuff going on in the real world,” she continued. “So just knowing that Dad liked Arie and was rooting for Arie while he was on The Bachelorette and met him, I kind of just saw it as a sign and it really just touched my heart. It was definitely our way to kind of escape the madness that was going on in reality.”
While chatting with Luyendyk during the cocktail party on Monday, Carroll said that the reality star recalled meeting her dad: “He said he did, but he was very sweet so he might just be saying that, but he seemed to. He claimed that he remembered!”
As for what’s next for Carroll? The resilient YouTube personality, who boasts more than 100,000 subscribers and 16,000 Instagram followers, is starting a podcast with her fellow night one castoffs. “When we were on that bus ride with tears dripping own down our faces, we really, really bonded and we just decided to make the most of this,” she explained. “We all went through something very traumatic and we were all winded, you know, shattered, and almost in just disbelief. We tried to create something positive out of it and that’s why we created The Rośe Girls. We wanted to create this platform to help inspire other women to find their unique brilliance and to kind of find the brilliance in the bullsh-t and to really stay true to who you are and that was our main mission with The Rośe Girls.”
The Bachelor airs on ABC Mondays at 8 p.m. ET.
