‘The Bachelor’ Calls Out Racist Bullying From Its Fans

(Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Bachelor Season 28, “The Women Tell All.”)

For the first half of Bachelor Joey Graziadei’s “The Women Tell All” reunion, everything unfolded as expected. Season alums like Maria Georgas, Sydney Gordon, and Lea Cayanan rehashed old feuds, while others, like Jennifer “Jenn” Tran, shed bittersweet tears about the time they spent with the hottest and most emotionally intelligent man this franchise has seen in decades. About halfway through the night, however, the proceedings took a turn as host Jesse Palmer addressed the audience directly.

Prompted by a tearful disclosure from the season’s third runner-up, Rachel Nance, Palmer called out the rise in bullying that Bachelor contestants have endured this season. In Nance’s case, a lot of the online hatred was racist harassment.

Nance was one of three women who accompanied Graziadei to Tulum, Mexico, for his final episodes. As seen on Monday night, she went home after a tearful rose ceremony, leaving Kelsey Anderson and Daisy Kent. In the days since Graziadei’s hometown dates aired, Nance—whose father is Black and whose mother is Filipino-American—said she has been barraged with hateful messages calling her, among other things, the n-word and “jungle Asian.” She has also seen TikTok videos in which users insinuate that they threw up every time she and Joey kissed.

As Nance tearfully explained what the past few weeks have been like for her, Graziadei pointed out what should be obvious to everyone: “You never deserved that,” he said.

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That’s when Jesse Palmer stepped in. “This season of The Bachelor, the love for these women, for the most part, has been really remarkable,” he said. “But for all the love that Joey and these women have received, there’s also sadly been a noticeable rise in hate on social media.”

This is not the first time The Bachelor has confronted racist and sexist bullying. Back in 2020, Rachel Lindsay, the franchise’s first Black Bachelorette, came on stage during Peter Weber’s “Women Tell All” reunion. Back then, Lindsay and the season’s contestants read some of the hateful messages aloud.

This year, when Palmer asked all of the women from this season (and multiple Golden Bachelor alums who participated) whether they’d received hateful messages online, the vast majority raised their hands to indicate that they had. “Here’s the thing Bachelor Nation,” Palmer said. “We love your strong opinions. I think it’s important that we uplift these women, who are brave enough to be vulnerable and to share their stories with Joey and with all of us at home. These women, they deserve our praise and not our hate.”

Graziadei echoed that sentiment. “People need to remember how much courage it takes to be able to do what they did,” he said of the women from this season. “To come out and to be who you are unapologetically and try to do your best. It should never be met with hate.”

As she closed off her segment in the reunion’s hot seat, Nance left the audience with a final reminder: “We’re not just faces on a screen,” she said. “I think people are so quick to be little keyboard warriors and kind of pop off because there’s no consequences. but we [the contestants] have to pay the consequences mentally and emotionally. Just be kind. Your words have weight to them, and things that you say really hit home sometimes. Just be kind.”

Racist Bachelor viewers have made themselves known ever since the very first season, when Bachelor Alex Michel (who is white) shared a kiss with LaNease Adams (who is Black) only for her to find bigoted posts on message boards after the episode aired. Speaking with The Daily Beast in 2021, Adams recalled the posts and their aftermath as “just a terrible experience.”

Earlier this year, at a Television Critics Association press conference, Bachelor producers struggled to answer a question from NPR’s Eric Deggans about why the franchise has faced so many race-based controversies. Matt James’ season as the first Black Bachelor in 2021 went haywire after photos surfaced of his frontrunner attending an antebellum South-themed party. After the show’s former host Chris Harrison defended her, Rachel Lindsay—whose own season endured some ham-fisted production choices when it came to race—spoke out about the franchise’s failures on that front. (Harrison was let go after defending the contestant.)

In a follow-up interview with Decider’s Nicole Gallucci after the TCA panel, producer Bennett Graebner said, “I was there for Matt James’ season. I was there for Rachel Lindsay’s season. I was also there for Michelle Young’s season, Tayshia Adams’ season, Charity Lawson’s season. I think as stewards of this franchise, which has been such a part of the cultural zeitgeist for over two decades, there’s a tremendous responsibility to have conversations on camera that are difficult and challenging—conversations about race, conversations about class, conversations about gender. We have done that. Have we always done it perfectly? No. We’ve certainly made some mistakes along the way. But moving forward we’re going to do everything in our power to correct this.”

Beyond the racist harassment that Graziadei, Nance, and Palmer addressed on Monday night, multiple participants from this season addressed the broader forms of bullying that have apparently run rampant online this season. Gordon thanked Graziadei for reaching out to make sure she was okay when people began attacking her, and Georgas—with whom she feuded this season—called internet users out for their behavior toward both Gordon and Cayanan.

“The hate that you have been getting on social media has crossed the line,” Georgas told Gordon. “It is something I do not condone or respect at all. And Lea, you as well. I don’t want you guys to get hate. That’s not what I wanted out of this. I wanted us to be good.”

Although the three women had spent much of the reunion’s first act re-hashing their interpersonal drama in not-so-peaceful terms, they took that moment to hug on stage, signaling to viewers that as passionate as everyone can get on screen, the line must be drawn somewhere.

And as for the rest of the reunion? First on the couch was Lexi Young, who left the season early after realizing that she and Graziadei were on different timelines when it came to having children. She’d previously opened up to Joey about her Stage 5 endometriosis diagnosis and shared on stage Monday night that he’d told her he wanted to have a “toolkit” on him at all times to help her when she felt pain due to a flare-up. Now, she said, she’s ready to find her “person.”

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Pretty much all of the women who spoke at the finale underscored that although Graziadei might seem too good to be true, he actually is the real deal. Tran said that her experience with Joey left her ready to find an equally fierce and committed love, and Nance offered the ultimate endorsement: “I’m so sure of who I am as a woman after dating Joey.”

And as for that cliffhanger from last week in Tulum? It turned out to mostly be a nothingburger. Kelsey Anderson just wanted to tell Graziadei how hard it was to go days without seeing him, and to make sure she’d said aloud that she wanted to meet his family. Graziadei, meanwhile, looked utterly terrified until he realized that Anderson was not, in fact, dumping him. Upon realizing what a spiral she’d induced in our Bachelor, Anderson immediately regretted the wording of her letter to him, which had read simply, “We need to talk.” Uh, yeah, you think?!

After the traditional blooper reel, our sneak peek to next week told us pretty much nothing new. Joey’s still on the beach crying, with a rose un-retrieved on its tray. “I didn’t expect it to go that way,” he says, and that’s pretty much it. It looks like we’ll have to wait until next week to find closure. On the bright side, however, that blooper reel did at least gift us with the joy of watching him struggle to correctly pronounce “Minneapolis” for several minutes. In other words, Joey is both a stand-up guy and, at his core, deeply silly. What more could Bachelor Nation want?

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