Years after their connection raised eyebrows among Bachelor Nation fans, former producer Julie LaPlaca is telling all about her relationship with Peter Weber.
“Peter had a genuine, pure heart that struck me,” Julie, 41, writes in her new book, The Love Producer, out Tuesday, July 7. “I sense that he really did want to find love, get married, and start a family. There was an innocence about him, and his optimism reminded me of myself before my heart had been hurt. His glimmer of excitement was like that of a kid about to enter the candy store, cute and a bit naive. He wanted to have the most beautiful love story the world would ever see and I really hoped we could deliver that for him.”
Julie worked behind the scenes on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette for seven years before ultimately leaving the reality TV world behind. While producing Peter’s season 24, she sparked a close bond with the pilot.
“During our time filming, I didn’t look at Peter romantically. I took my job seriously and focused on delivering the best possible season. I would tell him he looked hot before a date, but it was more in an older-sister-hyping-up-her-younger-brother way,” she writes.
Eventually, her feelings changed — and the pair hooked up after filming wrapped. (Peter, now 34, proposed to Hannah Ann Sluss during his finale, but their engagement was short-lived. He briefly reunited with runner-up Madi Prewett before ultimately splitting again.)
Before The Love Producer hit shelves, Julie exclusively opened up to Us Weekly about Peter’s response to the book, claiming he “reacted from a place of fear.”
“I offered to let him read a copy, and instead he panicked … I hope when he reads it, he sees that it’s coming from the heart,” she told Us.
Peter, meanwhile, addressed the memoir in an Instagram comment on June 30. “I’ve moved on from this period of my life and I’m ultimately responsible for my choices,” he wrote, in part. “What I’ll say is this: I asked Julie on multiple occasions to please keep private, intimate details, private. This wasn’t about a tv show anymore.”
Scroll down for more of Julie’s biggest revelations about Peter in The Love Producer:
The What Ifs
“Pick me, choose me, love me … Like Meredith Grey expressed to McDreamy in Grey’s Anatomy, I had so desperately wanted to say those words to [Peter] in the weeks leading up to his finale of The Bachelor, yet fear and denial got in the way,” Julie writes.
She recalls bumping into Peter — her “Prince Charming” — at Stagecoach Festival in 2023. “It was the ‘what ifs’ between me and Peter that lingered in my mind,” she continues. “What if I had told him how I really felt? What if I had told my bosses what really happened between us? What if we had given us a shot? What if, in the words of Kane Brown, Peter was made for me, and I was made for him?”
Instant Connection
When Peter was named the Bachelor after finishing Hannah Brown’s Bachelorette season in third place, he met with Julie in Los Angeles. The pair “immediately clicked on a personal level.”
“He felt like an old friend I’d known for years,” Julie writes. “His favorite book was The Secret, and he was a big believer in the power to manifest dreams into existence. He said he manifested being the Bachelor and I believed in wholeheartedly, sharing my own stories of manifesting over the years.”
She also felt an innate connection when she met his family, saying she “instantly felt at home” at the Webers’ house. “The warmth and love reminded me of my own upbringing. … Peter’s mother, Barb, and I were instantly best friends. They immediately made me feel like I was family,” she adds.
According to Julie, she and Peter became so close that he “even started campaigning for me to be the next Bachelorette,” which “really touched” her amid Peter’s own journey to find love.
When Sparks Started Flying
Julie’s feelings for Peter didn’t become romantic while they filmed his season, which also happened to feature her friend Natasha Parker as a contestant.
One of Julie’s bosses, however, allegedly saw the potential between her and Peter. “‘You know,’ he began. ‘One of our biggest fears before starting the season was that Peter would fall in love with you,’” she writes.
Peter began to appear in a new light while they were on location in Costa Rica, where he famously cut his face in a golf cart incident. The team later traveled to Chile, and Peter encouraged them all to go out.
“There was a moment that night where I fully surrendered my producer hat, lost myself to the music, and was just a girl dancing with a boy I had spent the past month getting to know,” Julie writes. “The Bachelor glow-up was real, as I was no longer looking at Peter like a young brother but as a hottie. Or maybe it was the bandage across his forehead, giving him a bit more edge like I’m normally drawn to.”
Julie kept her feelings to herself as she tried to figure out what was actually going on between them. “Did I have strong feelings for Peter, or was I falling for my own tricks?” she writes. “Was I sucked into the fantasy of the world I created for your viewing pleasure, or was I resisting something that was actually quite real?”
The Fantasy Suite(s)
Julie recalls having several intimate nights with Peter, the first of which took place as they were preparing for the Women Tell All special.
“Shame crept in. … How horrible of a producer could I be? I literally went and f***ed the first male contestant I produced,” she writes. “That is wrong on so many levels.”
Later, as production was halted on Clare Crawley’s Bachelorette season in March 2020 due to COVID, Julie and Peter hooked up multiple times. “I knew he wasn’t mentally in a place to jump into a relationship. Not after everything with Madison,” she writes. “But I couldn’t help but think about the possibility of whatever was happening.”
The fantasy was shattered soon after when Peter was spotted in Chicago with Kelley Flanagan, who placed fifth on his season. “I was crushed. Humiliated, embarrassed and heartbroken,” she recalls. “How could I have been played by someone I knew better than arguably anybody else? The biggest hurt of all was that he didn’t tell me.”
When Julie finally “got the courage” to reach out to Peter two weeks later, she “told him I cared deeply for him as a friend and would always value that first and foremost. He agreed and wanted to remain friends as well. But it was clear to me that his new girlfriend, Kelley, did not want us to stay in touch.”
Ending It All
Before officially leaving her producer role, Julie was “in a constant state of fear that someone would find out about me and Peter.” She felt “paranoid” about the possibility of other colleagues already knowing and “gossiping about it behind my back.”
She eventually stepped back from the franchise entirely. Both she and Peter dated other people in the years that followed, but Julie still “dreamed up ways of how I’d express my love to Peter.”
“Admittedly, it wasn’t until the tabloids speculated that Peter was seeing Ekin-Su from The Traitors that I gained the courage to reach out,” she writes. “The rumors brought up old wounds from the headlines with Kelley.”
She texted Peter in March 2024 — “just about four years to the day since the last time we’d hooked up,” Julie points out — and they agreed to speak on the phone.
“Ultimately, I admitted that I loved him, and feared if I didn’t tell him, I would always wonder ‘what if.’ He seemed shocked by the revelation,” she writes.
The pair agreed that their “timing” was never quite right. When they hung up, Julie felt “so much lighter.”
“Honestly, I don’t know that I was even hoping for Peter to confess his love and for us to be together,” she admits. “I think I knew deep down we were on different paths in our lives, and that the call was for my own release and healing.”
