‘The Bachelor’: Gabi Confronts Zach About ‘Extremely Violating’ Decision to Make Fantasy Suite Night Public
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“I get it, sex sells, but now I’ve become a narrative,” Gabi Elnicki told Zach Shallcross during Monday’s Bachelor finale
Warning: This post contains spoilers from Monday’s season finale of The Bachelor.
After getting dumped by Zach Shallcross on Monday’s Bachelor season 27 finale, Gabi Elnicki revealed her reaction to what happened during Fantasy Suites.
Zach, 26, made a rule not to engage in sex of any kind with any of his three finalists in an attempt to keep things simple. But that backfired when he and Gabi, 25, chose to be intimate, and then, in an effort to clear his conscience, Zach told his now-fiancée Kaity Biggar that he’d had sex with the account executive.
“It’s a part of me that I’ll never get back that I shared with him,” Gabi told host Jesse Palmer during the After the Final Rose special. “It’s extremely violating that the entire nation knows everything.”
Related:The Bachelor’s Zach Shallcross Feels ‘Confident’ in His Final Pick, Although ‘It Wasn’t Pretty All the Time’
When Jesse, 44, brought Zach out to join Gabi on stage, she told him she felt “blindsided,” although, “I understand what you were trying to do.”
Still, “what I wish would’ve happened was that you warned me that you were going to use my name and that you were going to tell everyone what had happened,” Gabi continued.
Gabi revealed that, during their overnight date, she and Zach agreed to keep their decision to have sex between the two of them.
“It was consensual, and it was what we wanted,” she said to Zach. “We decided that it was going to be between us. We said that that night. And I remember I was brushing my teeth, you came up behind me, you kissed me on the back of my head, you said, ‘This is just between us.’ And I said, ‘Yes, this is just between us.'”
As a result, Gabi felt “ashamed” when information about their time together went public. She also didn’t know the extent of what Zach shared with others until the episode aired last week.
“I just thought it was between us,” Gabi said. “I thought it was love. I thought it was more than a TV show. I get it, sex sells, but now I’ve become a narrative.”
Zach accepted responsibility for the way he approached Fantasy Suites. “There’s no excuse for the way I handled things,” he said.
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Earlier in the night, Zach’s third finalist Ariel Frenkel spoke about the Fantasy Suite mess. Ariel said that she, like Gabi, also found out about what went down from watching the episode.
“It really hurts to find everything out on TV when everyone else does, with a partner that you’ve shared so many intimate moments with,” Ariel, 28, told Jesse. “I was really disappointed in the way the whole week was handled. I was disappointed in the way that I was left completely not knowing anything from Zach.”
When Zach — who got engaged to Kaity in the season finale — faced Ariel, she wanted answers.
“By putting sex off the table, you made the entire week about sex, and it didn’t need to be like that,” Ariel, 28, told Zach.
Zach explained he made the decision under the guise of, “let’s make this not as messy.”
“In reality, I made it way more complicated,” he admitted.
Ariel wanted to know why she ended up being the only woman not to find out that his approach to the week changed.
Related:Bachelor Zach Shallcross Says His ‘Heart Has Been Yanked in 2 Directions’ Ahead of Proposal Day
“I committed to being in an open relationship — that’s what it is, that’s what I want to call it — we were,” Ariel told Zach. “When the parameters of an open relationship change, I should be the first to know. I should have not been left in the dark sitting … standing up there in Thailand at the rose ceremony. You had ample time to also tell me about everything before I left.”
Zach confessed he did mess up. “I really made it one-sided and that was very selfish of me,” he said, later adding, “I did mess up and I wish I could make that better.”
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