Kelly Ripa isn’t letting Arie Luyendyk Jr. off easy after his Bachelor betrayal.
America watched Monday as the 36-year-old race car driver dumped fiancée Becca Kufrin on national television, only to propose to her runner-up, Lauren Burnham.
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So when the now-happy couple went on Live With Kelly and Ryan Wednesday, Ripa ripped into the reality TV personality with pointed questions about his new relationship.
“I want to understand everything. Your thought process. What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you [Lauren]? What are you thinking? How did this happen? Were you as shady as you think you are now?” Ripa began her interview, as Luyendyk started to squirm.
Diving into his broken relationship with Kufrin, Seacrest then asked, “Isn’t that a red flag in some way?” to which Ripa added to Burnham, “It’s a red flag for you!”
Luyendyk, defending himself, said he felt pressure to propose on the day of the finale filming, and that he shouldn’t have proposed at all due to his conflicted feelings about the women.
“Lauren had trouble opening up on the show a little bit and our relationship really developed late,” he said. “And I was always vying for her affection, and my feelings were always ahead of her feelings.”
“I had a hard time expressing myself to him,” Burnham added, to which Ripa replied, “I don’t blame you at all.”
“I think towards the end, as the Bachelor, you think OK, this is the day I have to make a decision,” Luyendyk continued. “And I really tried to think logically about it, and I shouldn’t have proposed on that day.”
While Seacrest pried for more details about the timeline on which Luyendyk and Burnham reconnected, Ripa remained skeptical. “Shady shady,” she said.
Ripa then asked Burnahm if she fears her new fiancé’s tendency toward “buyer’s remorse.”
The 25-year-old revealed that it was a major issue they discussed before getting back together, spawning “a lot of conversations.”
Luyendyk quickly jumped in, saying, “We’ve spent the last few months talking for hours and spending every week together and we feel so solid. … I feel like this has made our relationship stronger.”
Burnham said while it’s “twisted” to think of Kufrin’s heartbreak that way, “For me, if he had chosen me from the beginning, I would always wonder if he was truly over Becca. So now at least I know.”
Ripa then dug in to Luyendyk’s decision to film his breakup with Kufrin, saying, “It seemed excessively cruel.”
“Through every breakup, there’s always questions of what went wrong,” he replied. “And I knew that if we did it on camera, I could take ownership of it and that it was completely my fault and my doing. I thought that was important.”
“And the whole thing started on camera, and I wanted the story to be told all the way to the end,” Luyendyk continued.
But fear not for Kufrin. She’ll have her pick of men during the upcoming season of The Bachelorette, ABC announced Tuesday.
The Bachelorette premieres May 28 on ABC.
Photo credit: ABC
