Not her experience. Rachel Lindsay has been around the Bachelor Nation block, having starred on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. However, she denied that producers from the reality TV franchise swayed her in the way that fellow alums Dylan Barbour and Jed Wyatt have claimed.
“I never felt manipulated. I never felt like I was being taken advantage of,” Lindsay, 35, exclusively told Us Weekly on Wednesday, February 3, while promoting MTV’s Ghosted: Love Gone Missing. “When I see people say that, I’m almost like, ‘That’s on you, that you felt like you fell for that type of scenario. I don’t know if you’re trying to get attention. I’m not sure if, you know, like, you’re trying to excuse some of the decisions you made, but we are all grown people. You made those decisions for whatever reason it is. Don’t try to now go blame it on somebody else.’”
Despite her stance on Barbour, 26, and Wyatt’s allegations, the “Bachelor Happy Hour” cohost acknowledged that producers make suggestions at times to allow for more entertaining scenarios. “But obviously, yeah, they’re making a TV show,” she noted. “So I might have to keep someone on as a Bachelorette for [a] two-on-one [date], but they never told me who I needed to pick at the end. They never forced me. They might’ve said, ‘Hey, you might want to take this person on a date because they have an interesting story,’ but I was never swayed in my decision of who I wanted at the end of all of this.”
Barbour, who appeared on season 15 of The Bachelorette and season 6 of Bachelor in Paradise, made claims about the franchise’s producers in a lengthy Twitter Q&A with fans on Saturday, January 30. “They need you until they don’t,” he wrote. “Each person is a pawn in a larger scheme, and they do not have contestants [sic] best interests in mind. Mental health is not a concern. Multiple people develop issues post show and they do nothing to help. If anything, they fuel hate.”
After the California native alleged Wyatt, 27, was “the most screwed over by production” during Hannah Brown’s season, the musician claimed via his Instagram Story on Sunday, January 31, that he “was highly manipulated and from it deeply mentally affected from the show.” The Dancing With the Stars alum, 26, ended their brief engagement in 2019 amid accusations that Wyatt had a girlfriend when he came on the show.
Lindsay, for her part, married Bryan Abasolo in August 2019 after getting engaged during season 13 of The Bachelorette in 2017. Her MTV investigative docuseries, Ghosted: Love Gone Missing, returns with five new episodes for a weeklong event airing Monday, February 8, through Friday, February 12.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
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