When Kelley Flanagan tunes into Michelle Young’s season of The Bachelorette, she’ll see a familiar face! While discussing how much drama goes down between Bachelor Nation alums off screen, the Bachelor season 24 alum revealed one of the Bachelorette season 17 contestants reached out to her in the past.
“We all, like, talk, but you know who’s doing what. There’s a lot of DMs going on,” Kelley, 29, said on Us Weekly’s “Here for the Right Reasons” podcast, noting that “so many” former contestants have messaged her on Instagram. “Honestly, I think that there should be an aftershow with a bunch of us that went on the show because the drama does not stop after the show. The stuff that still goes on, you would be shocked. I’ll give you this — I just saw Michelle’s cast come out and one of those guys used to be in my DMs before I was even on the show.”
While the Chicago native wouldn’t name names, she noted, “This world is too small, like, I don’t know how that happens. But when I saw that, I was like, ‘Huh, all right, that’s funny.’ … And I could assume he may have been in one of the other contestants’ DMs as well.”
Michelle’s season of The Bachelorette premieres next month. ABC dropped the 30 contestants competing for the Minnesota teacher’s heart earlier this week. When asked whether Kelley reaches out to other Bachelor stars when someone from the show hits her up on Instagram, she replied, “Yes and no.”
“It depends on how close you are with that person, but usually you hear from the grapevine if anything’s getting serious with anyone,” she explained. “And you’ll be like, ‘Oh, I know that guy,’ or ‘Oh, that guy was in my DMs too.’”
While competing on Peter Weber’s season of The Bachelor in 2020, Kelley was eliminated ahead of the hometown dates. After the season finished airing, however, she dated the pilot for 10 months, calling it quits for good in February. Since then, Bachelorette season 16 contestant Bennett Jordan made headlines for publicly pursuing Kelley, but nothing happened between them.
“Bennett’s Bennett. I wasn’t going to stop them no matter what the case was,” she told Us. “I would speak to him as a friend, but there wasn’t anything there and he was going to do whatever he wanted to do and let him do it, I guess.”
Neither Bennett, who confirmed he was off the market earlier this month, nor Kelley ended up on season 7 of BiP, a decision she told Us on the podcast that she doesn’t regret.
“The show brings on a lot of stress,” she said, adding that she was in a period of “transition” at the time of filming. “[I was] going through a breakup, I was moving, trying to figure out where the heck I’m moving. Health-wise, I knew something was wrong. I was, like, this timing is off. I didn’t really see anyone that I was super interested in, that I knew was going. … I think the producers always said, they’re like, ‘We actually liked Kelley, she was just too normal for our show.’ One of the girls from Paradise just recently told me that that’s what they said. And they said that to me, to my face.”
For more from Kelley, watch the video above and listen to Us Weekly’s “Here for the Right Reasons” podcast.
