‘Bachelorette’ Meredith Phillips Claims She Was Drugged, Sexually Assaulted During Season 2

Meredith Phillips, the star of The Bachelorette season 2, said in a podcast released Wednesday that she was drugged and sexually assaulted during filming of the ABC reality show.

In a conversation during Steve Carbone’s podcast, Reality Steve, she said she found fault in the show’s producers, according to Reality Blurred.

“Well, besides being always really tired and some of the producers were — how do I say this? Helpful but not helpful, in terms of trying to make me relax,” Phillips said, adding that she “normally wouldn’t talk about this, but I’m going to tell you because it’s bothered me for years. And I know another friend of mine who was currently working on the show felt the same experience I did, about getting roofied and in a hot tub and kind of accosted.”

When Carbone asked if she was “roofied” by a producer, she said, “By a masseuse that a producer hired to come into my room and to give me a massage.”

Phillips said that the masseuse said, “‘Okay, I’m going to give you a pill.’ And I’m like, ‘Ok.’ I just assumed it was, like, an aspirin or something to loosen up my back, or Tylenol, or something. And it definitely wasn’t that, that’s for sure.”

Phillips said that “The last thing I remember was she got naked and she was in the tub with me, and rubbing my back and rubbing areas probably she shouldn’t have. And then I was put in bed. I woke up naked. Don’t remember much.”

Phillips, whose season of The Bachelorette was filmed in 2003 and aired in early 2004, said that the experience was “hard for me to talk about because I think I’ve put it somewhere else in my brain.”

She said once whatever pill she’d taken kicked in, “I literally couldn’t even move my body, so I have no idea what the pill was, at all. All I know is that I was told that, ‘This will make you feel better.’”

She later added that she “couldn’t move my limbs, let alone even smile. I probably was drooling. So I don’t know what I was given.”

When asked why she didn’t leave the show after the incident, Phillips said that there was “definitely a part of me” that wanted to leave, “But I am also the kind of person that finishes what she starts.”

“It is a huge deal. I have worked through it. Maybe thrown it in the back of my mind,” she said.

Phillips, who was one of the finalists on season 4 of The Bachelor with Bob Guiney, got engaged to Ian McKee after season 2 of The Bachelorette. She married Michael Broady in 2011.

Elsewhere in the podcast, she opened up about her alcoholism, which she revealed to Good Morning America in 2013.