The Bachelor may have led Arie Luyendyk Jr. to his fiancée Lauren Burnham, but it also turned most of America against him — a fact that hasn’t escaped the reality TV alum.
The shocking, divisive finale of Luyendyk Jr.’s season of The Bachelor concluded with him dumping his first fiancée, Becca Kufrin, to propose to Burnham, a move that made him persona non grata among even the more controversial members of Bachelor Nation.
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Even after the finale premiered, during Luyendyk Jr.’s required media tour, he made a number of excuses as to why he chose to film his break-up with Kufrin, even though the show didn’t require him to. From claiming it would make it easier for her to become the next Bachelorette, to making sure the entire journey was captured on camera, Luyendyk Jr. was staunchly standing behind what he did.
However, in an enlightening new GQ profile, Luyendyk Jr. is now admitting how he feels “100 percent” betrayed by his supposed producer “friends” who pressured him into filming the embarassing break-up.
“It was completely edited,” he explained, calling out the show advertising the 40-minute break-up as the first-ever “unedited” scene in the franchise’s history. “I was told to stay on that couch. I tried to leave, and then production was like, ‘You need to go back inside. She’s finally calming down. I feel like you owe it to her to have this conversation.’ So then I went back in the house.”
When asked if Bachelor producers prevented him from leaving the house at his request, Luyendyk Jr. confirmed that it was true:
“Yeah. I left, came back. I stepped away from the couch, I went back to the couch,” he said. The producers convinced him into staying, however. “They cut out, obviously, production talking to me from 10 feet away,” he says, and calling it unedited “was super unfair to me.”
A spokesman for Warner Bros., which handles production for The Bachelor, declined to comment to GQ.
Despite his feelings of betrayal, Luyendyk Jr. admits “there’s still a lot of love” for that Bachelor production team, even though it caused him to become one of the most hated people in America for a bit. But things appear to be turning around for the Arizona real estate agent — he and Burnham plan to marry in a Hawaiian ceremony this January. It won’t be televised.
Meanwhile, Kufrin is getting a second chance at love during this upcoming season of The Bachelorette, admitting in May that she is engaged after the season’s filming. But to whom?
The Bachelorette season premiere airs Monday, May 28 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
Photo credit: ABC
