Arie Blames the Bachelor

The most hated Bachelor in history is furious with the show. Arie Luyendyk Jr.‘s season was concluded with a bang when the real estate agent dumped the winner, Becca Kufrin, and decided to propose to the runner-up Lauren Burnham.

At the time, he said he dumped her on live television for her sake so she could become the next Bachelorette. (It worked…and Kufrin has confirmed that she emerged from the new ABC season engaged.)

• But in a new profile in GQ, Luyendyk Jr. claimed he’s the one who was “betrayed” by the franchise and producers who pressured him into filming the breakup.
• “It was completely edited,” he explained, disagreeing with the show’s description of the 40-minute break-up as the first-ever “unedited” scene in the franchise’s history.
• He continued: “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.”
• “Yeah. I left, came back. I stepped away from the couch, I went back to the couch,” after producers persuaded him to stay. “They cut out, obviously, production talking to me from 10 feet away,” he said, and contended calling it unedited “was super unfair to me.”
• He and Burnham are set to marry in January, but not on live TV.
• Meanwhile, host Chris Harrison also had some thoughts on last season. “Even I say, he was a knucklehead. He made some really dumb decisions. He didn’t perform as perfectly as he probably would’ve liked,” Harrison told THR in a new interview. “If he could go back, he’d probably fix some things. But he and Lauren are in love and at the end of the day, the most important thing is that he’s with the girl he should be with and Becca’s good.”
• The new season of The Bachelorette can be seen Mondays on ABC at 8 p.m. EST.