‘Bachelor’ Alum Reveals Why She Turned Down ‘Dancing With the Stars’

The Bachelor alum Courtney Robertson reveals she was once offered the chance to participate on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars but turned down the opportunity due to some opposition from her then-fiance Ben Flajnik. “Dancing With the Stars, I had a meeting with them right after my season [of The Bachelor],” Robertson said on Thursday’s episode of the “She’s All Bach” podcast. “That was one I would have loved to have done.”

Robertson and Flajnik got engaged after Season 16 of the ABC reality show but they eventually called it quits after a couple of months.  She says, at the time. Flajnik didn’t approve of the idea. “He was like, ‘If you do it, you won’t have a fiancé.’”

Robertson, however, says she was surely interested in taking on the dancing competition –– especially since it came with a nice paycheck. “They explained the whole thing, like, you get to pick out your music and design your costumes,” the I Didn’t Come Here to Make Friends author said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I would be sparkling all over the place.’ … I got to go and sit in the front row and watch [the show]. And each week you go on, they pay you more. There’s, like, an incentive.”

 “You make another, like, $30,000 or something,” she said, alleging that she was initially offered $150,000 to join the show. “That was kind of exciting,” she added.

While Flajnik wasn’t particularly excited at the idea of her joining the show, Robertson says he wasn’t the entire reason why she didn’t do it. She claims the cast had already been assembled at the time she was being considered, she says. The two ended for different reasons, which she detailed in her 2015 memoir. They may not have been on the best of terms for some time, but the two are reportedly now on good terms. 

“I was not happy about the book. I didn’t read the book. I flipped through it,” Flajnik told Us Weekly in July. “People do things for different reasons — who knows, you know, what she was going through at the time. We’ve since made amends. We’re fine. We’re cool.”

Robertson also said she and her ex have had nice conversations since then. “He reached out … and we actually met up in Santa Barbara,” she recalled. “It was really just kind of friendly and … he was like, ‘No more books.’”