“Of course, no problem!” I said, trying to be supportive.
Ben did countless phone interviews and watched future episodes of The Bachelor with his headphones on, laughing loudly when I said drunkenly in Sonoma, “It’s a war out there.” He also was tippity-tapping away on his blog for People.com. He didn’t tell me what he was writing and never asked for my opinion. I had to read it myself online with everyone else after it was published each week. I was none too pleased when Ben confessed that Jennifer was the best kisser in the cast.
Ben also invited a bunch of crew members over for lunch, where I learned that Vienna Girardi and Jake Pavelka also stayed in this house and almost had their cover blown after they accidentally tripped the alarm and the fire department showed up. Later, one of the producers pulled me aside and warned me that it was going to get progressively worse for me. I had no idea what she was talking about.
It was the first time someone from the show hinted that there might be something larger going on, something that I had no control over.
BY THE TIME we got to our third Happy Couple Weekend in Inverness, on a misty oceanside peninsula an hour from San Francisco, the third episode had run. I had officially become the villain of season 16 after I asked Kacie B, “How’d that taste coming out of your mouth?” among other explosive comments and general cockiness.
I wasn’t watching the show, but my sister was, and she was getting bombarded with e-mails and tweets from strangers, friends, and distant relatives who crawled out of the woodwork. Rachel, who is a lawyer, was even accosted in the copy room by a coworker demanding to know the scoop about Ben and me. Rachel was already exhausted trying to defend me—and the show had barely started airing.
* * *
KEEPING IT REAL
Life After The Bachelor
by Graham Bunn
The show is a privilege to be a part of but comes with a cost that many people aren’t ready for, myself included. In that you are exactly who the show portrays you to be, just magnified beyond measure. Whether you like it or not, you are forced to see yourself in a blinding light of self-evaluation. You find out a lot about who you are and who you want to be after its airing. Now, granted, you get the experience of insane dates, incredibly beautiful women of past, present, and future cast, this author included, of course. The lessons learned come with the experience of doing the show but what you do with those lessons are sold separately.
* * *
Ben was aware that I’d become a lightning rod, but so far he hadn’t said a word to me about it. On the way to Inverness, he asked me to stop at Whole Foods, where I blew $1,000 on food for our weekend and groceries for Ben’s apartment, including paper towels and “good” olive oil, as he requested. As I shopped, he drank at a bar down the street from our cottage.
The first night Ben invited his sister, Julia, and her boyfriend, Garrett, over for dinner. Julia and I were instant best friends and I loved Garrett. He was warm and captivating, and a really good boyfriend. He treated Julia like a queen.
You know how couples try to out-lovey-dovey each other? Ben was very affectionate that night as we played board games and Uno. He even talked for the first time since filming the show about me moving up to San Francisco. He’d been looking at properties online and showed me a few he liked. “Is it crazy to think about buying a house?” he asked. I was so excited and told him I could go to castings in the city.
All was wonderful, until Ben decided to make steaks for dinner. He was bossy boots in the kitchen again and criticized the way I chopped tomatoes for the salad I was allowed to prepare under heightened supervision. “Are you really going to cut those like that?” he asked. “You eat with your eyes.”
At first, his passion for cooking was cute. But now it was starting to annoy me that he thought he was a Michelin star chef and I was his lowly sous chef. As he sliced and diced, he was so in the zone that he ignored everyone. Then when we sat down to eat, he discussed and dissected the meal, bragging how perfectly he charred the steak and criticizing me for putting an entire portobello mushroom on top of my steak without slicing it first. He was mad I ruined his plating.
The next day, Ben’s mom came for a visit. I noticed that they bickered a lot and she was hard on him about not spending enough quality time with her. I’d noticed her demeanor toward me had changed drastically since our friendly phone call before the show started airing. I could tell she no longer liked me and couldn’t fake it. She seemed very uncomfortable when I was affectionate with Ben, staring at us with a baffled look on her face when we held hands.
“Is this real?” she asked point-blank.
“Yes, Mom,” Ben said. “This is real.”
Right before Julia and Garrett left, Babs asked me how work was going. I told her that I had to go to New York soon to model for Stein Mart.
“Oh, I can’t believe you work for them,” she said condescendingly, rolling her eyes.
“Mom!” Ben and Julia scolded.
“Well, they pay me $2,500 a day and I love going to New York.”
Babs’s comment cut me to the bone. It’s really hard to get regular clients in modeling and I was proud to have such a long run and steady income from this bread-and-butter client. I mean would she have preferred Ben brought home a VIP cocktail waitress? Or is being a nanny, like Kacie B, a more suitable career for her son’s future wife?
After Julia and Garret left, Ben had to go back to San Fran so I was left alone with Babs for an hour before I went home to L.A. As we sat drinking tea, we had another awkward and confrontational conversation.
“How is your family doing?” she asked.
“My mom isn’t happy about what’s happening.”
“I didn’t want Ben to do the show either. Couldn’t you find a common bond with the other girls?”
“Those girls were really mean to me.”
“Couldn’t you have tried harder? Couldn’t you have faked it a little bit?”
I wished Ben hadn’t left me alone here. I tried to change the subject again. She hadn’t asked me much about myself, so I started to talk about my past and my career, to show her how hard I’ve worked. I wanted to tell her that I’d lived in New Zealand, because I wanted her to be proud of me.
“I’ve traveled the world …” I started to explain, but Babs cut me off.
“You said that on the show. You should never say that. It makes you look bad.”
If my mom were here, she would have bitch-slapped this woman. But what came next truly knocked the wind out of me: “I guess you should wait it out and sell the ring. You can split the money.”
I WENT BACK to Santa Monica with an awful taste in my mouth—from both Ben’s steak and his mother. I loved Ben so much but I wondered how I would survive the rest of my life with Babs as my in-law. It was a serious problem.
Another serious problem with our relationship was that when I wasn’t with Ben, I was completely out of sight, out of mind. At the end of January, he left for the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, to film a segment with Extra host Mario Lopez. As soon as Ben left, he fell off the map and I couldn’t reach him. He was barely responding to my texts or calls.
“Sorry muffin,” he texted. “Lots of little girlies that want pics.”
I went online to look for clues and saw in paparazzi photos that he was Sundance’s celebutante. He was carousing all over town wearing a white beanie I’d never seen before. One gossip story claimed that while he was partying at the Bing Bar “multiple” ladies were lining up to meet him and that he definitely wasn’t acting like an engaged guy. He’d been attending screenings, going to clubs, picking up mountains of swag, and even hung out with Michael Cera and Parks and Rec star Aziz Ansari at a Drake concert. He was having a little too much fun without me and I was furious.
“I’m sorry that you’ve been so busy. I’m trying to be as understanding as possible,” I texted him. “But this is hard. I feel neglected and am unhappy. Call me.”
I finally reache
d him on his cell and chewed him out. I asked where he’d been and what happened to the charcoal beanie I’d bought him for Christmas. He said he lost it somewhere in Park City.
For the first time in our relationship, I warned him that he needed to start making me a priority. Then I hung up on him.
11
PAPS & A SMEAR CAMPAIGN
For the first month after the show premiered, I continued living my normal, pre-Bachelor life. I was still modeling for regular clients like Stein Mart and going on frequent castings. The only stories about me that had surfaced in the press were a few small items about me dating Jesse Metcalfe, Adrian Grenier, and Jim Toth. Only one person on the planet knew about Adrian and Jim. I felt really bad that Jim was named, since we’d only been on one date.
Ben wasn’t that upset that I’d been with celebrities. We’d come clean about our dating histories in Belize. I also knew that he’d hooked up with The Client List star Jennifer Love Hewitt during the short break between The Bachelorette and The Bachelor, but he admitted to me that she got too clingy after one date. In fact, he dished that she offered him twice as much money as The Bachelor offered him to not go on the show. He declined. I thought it was kind of funny that right before the show aired, she was photographed looking miserable carrying the book Why Men Love Bitches. I joked that it was a jab at me.
Even as negative press started to bubble up, Ben and I were solid and very much in love. I thought. The long distance was really hard. Because he was so busy, we often missed each other’s phone calls. When we did connect, we rarely had good conversations. They were always short and strained, and lacked substance. We never lay in bed on the phone for hours, laughing and talking about our future.
The tide started to turn when Ben was invited to be a guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on January 25. She drilled him and tore into me, to the delight of the audience. “She manipulated you,” Ellen proclaimed. “She came off not nice … She was just playing you … man. You got played.” Ben wasn’t allowed to say much; only three episodes had aired. But he didn’t even try to defend me either. He warned me with a text after the taping: “Probably don’t want to watch.”
The shit really hit the fan on January 30, when episode 4, “Skinny Dippers Gone Wild,” aired and Ben’s bare ass was beamed into 8 million homes across America with only a pixilated square for cover. It didn’t seem that controversial in the moment, but we grossly underestimated how taboo and rare male nudity is on prime-time network television. (Remember David Caruso’s ass shot in the shower on NYPD Blue? Me either, that’s how long ago it happened.) Plus, Ben just looked so utterly and easily wrapped around my finger on the show. I barely had to bat an eye and he dropped trou, his underpants tossed onto the beach like a hot potato.
“How are we going to get through this?” Ben asked me in a frantic phone call. He was super embarrassed and blaming me for everything, even though he was getting negative press, too. He had been called out for being boring and insensitive to the girls, especially when Kacie B admitted to him that she overcame a serious eating disorder and his response seemed unmoved, uncaring.
I tried to calm him down. I assured him it was going to blow over.
Well, it didn’t blow over. It blew up. We were skewered in the press and on social media, with critiques ranging from “Hot and disgusting!” to “Obnoxious and daring!” I was called “a flaming bag of cunt” by one commenter and “topless and bottomless and classless” by Possessionista, the self-described fashion critic of The Bachelor. BachelorRant.com ran photos of lanky, disheveled Brit comedian Russell Brand and me, claiming that we were long-lost twins. My favorite headline came from Business Insider: “How Courtney the Sex Genius Ruined The Bachelor Forever.” Someone in Jesse Metcalfe’s camp gave off-the-record quotes to a gossip site trivializing our relationship, saying we only dated for a few weeks, that I used him to get famous, and was a “stage five clinger.” That really hurt. It’s something I feel he never would have said about me. Even to this day, I hope it didn’t come from him.
Ellen wasn’t the only talk show host hating on me. Kelly Ripa ripped me a new one on her show. I was pretty bummed because I was a huge fan of her on All My Children. She imitated me, twirling her hair on her finger like a ditz and pursing her lips like she’d eaten a lemon (in all fairness, I did do those things). She even acted out the skinny-dipping scene with Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe playing the role of Ben. “You made him sound so sensitive and smart,” Kelly marveled.
Many in Bachelor Nation, the unofficial name for the show’s alumni, did not have my back. Ben himself said he felt “crappy” after the skinny-dipping incident. Chris Harrison’s wife went on the record saying, “I was rooting for Lindzi the whole time.” Ashley Spivey, one of many rejected by Brad Womack, called me “the devil” in her blog and ranted, “I would never do that on national television. I think it’s extremely disrespectful to the other girls.” I heard through the grapevine that she also said about me, “I don’t know what everyone sees in her. She must have a magic vagina.” Ben’s best friend from Ashley’s season, Constantine Tzortzis, called me “dishonest,” an “Ice Princess,” and “a mistake.”
Original Bachelorette Trista Sutter was particularly vicious, launching tweet-bombs about me from the very beginning like, “As a mother, I can’t imagine that Courtney’s is even remotely proud of her. Poor choices in actions, words and attitude.” She also gave a television interview in which she said she wanted to reach through the television and slap me. This is coming from a forty-one-year-old married woman who apparently has nothing better to do with her life than hurl insults online about a person she’s never met. Yep, she’s setting a great example for her two children.
A few alums did try to support me. Though Ashley Hebert tattled that I’d “stolen” my fake vows from Sex and the City—and her love J. P. called me a “manipulative villain”—she also said, “I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt!” A producer contacted me and said Bachelorette Jillian Harris had reached out, offering advice. “If she needs to talk, tell her to call me.” Unfortunately, I had no idea who she was. If I had just asked my superfan sister, Rachel, she would have told me how sweet Jillian is and how she stoically survived brutal press about her engagement to alleged cheater Ed Swiderski. Regretfully, I never called her, but I want to thank her now for being one of the few who didn’t judge me.
* * *
KEEPING IT REAL
Trista’s Terrible Tweets
Get a life, Sutter!
JAN. 9: I think the chemistry between Ben and Courtney is obvious. Whether he sees the inconsiderate side of her is yet to be seen.
JAN. 16: Booksmart can be a little boring. Courtney has a point but confused as to whether she’s saying she’s really stupid or really boring herself.
JAN. 16: I don’t care who you’ve modeled for, rude behavior is not pretty.
JAN. 25: Wonder why [Ben] can’t see … the alarmingly conceded [sic] Courtney.
JAN. 25: Courtney calls herself confident. I’d say maybe uneducated because what you are is conceded [sic] not confident.
FEB. 6: Think Courtney may need another lesson on meanings of words. Respectful & prude are not the same thing. Clearly u know about neither.
FEB. 6: Seriously Courtney? Shaking ur ‘1 with nature’ breasts 4 the village children? Stay FAR away from Vail & 2 little ones w/last name Sutter.
FEB. 27: That weird magical force that draws Ben to Courtney is manipulation.
MARCH 5: You are incredibly meanspirited.
MARCH 12: Courtney thinks she was just being honest thru the show and honesty hurts. Actually, cruelty hurts. Honesty is something different altogether.
MARCH 12: Truly don’t think Courtney knows the difference between right & wrong & how to treat the rest of the human race. Hoped she had learned. Nope.
* * *
My ex Chris came to my rescue as well. He was hounded by every media outlet on the planet and his phone was blowing u
p constantly, but he ignored offers for thousands of dollars from every tabloid. He only gave one free interview to an entertainment website.
Thank God my parents were on a cruise (ironically in Puerto Rico) and missed the skinny-dipping incident. Ben was suddenly MIA up in San Francisco. “All I see is negativity and I’m struggling to know what’s real or not,” he texted. “Just need time to clear my head.”
“That hurts to hear,” I responded. “You know me. I thought we were stronger than that. You should let me be there for you to work through this. This is causing damage and the lack of communication is very unhealthy.” I’d heard from my show sources that when Ashley Hebert got slammed in the tabloids, J. P. was Super Fiancé, sending her flowers and talking to her on the phone for hours on end to cheer her up.
Since Ben was little help, my sister Rachel flew to L.A. for an emergency visit and, as I drove to the airport to pick her up, I noticed a creepy man following me in his car. I hoped he wasn’t a stalker or a deranged Bachelor fan. I was terrified.
From the airport Rachel and I drove to Venice Beach to go to First Friday, an outdoor street fair where food trucks line up. The creepy guy tailed us the whole time, trying to get us to roll down the car window. When we pulled up to a valet on Abbot Kinney, he jumped out of his car and ran over yelling, “Don’t be scared! I’m just the paparazzi!”
Flash! Click! Flash flash click!
Oh no, I was wearing a tank top with a panda bear on it.
We ran into sushi restaurant Wabi-Sabi to escape.
After dinner, more paps surrounded us as we left the restaurant and strolled down the street. A middle-aged guy sitting in front of a gallery was surveying the scene and as I walked by he remarked dryly, “You’re growing on me.” I knew right then that if this soccer dad recognized me, probably because his wife forced him to watch the show, I was in trouble.
I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends: Confessions of a Reality Show Villain Page 16
