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Way before Jesse Palmer was the host of The Bachelor, he actually was The Bachelor. The ex-football player was the star of the show back in 2004 during its fifth season.
Eleven years later, Lifetime TV premiered the series Unreal, a drama based on the experience of former Bachelor producer Sarah Gertrude Shapiro. Unreal was a show-within-a-show that chronicled the making of a pretend reality series called Everlasting, which had plenty of similarities to the ABC hit reality show.
Unreal hit close to home for Jessica Holcomb, a season 5 contestant on The Bachelor who remembers Shapiro well, and not in a good way.
What was Jessica Holcomb’s experience on the show?
On The Bachelor, Jessica Holcomb’s experience could have been a better. She was eliminated in week 3, but that short period of time negatively impacted her life.
She explained that the rose ceremonies, which appear fast enough on TV, really go on for over five hours. The former contestant told Cosmopolitan in 2016, “You’re standing there forever. So by the time it’s over, I remember the first one, the sun came up. That’s how long it was.”
According to Holcomb, the producers do whatever they can to manipulate the contestants. “I would do and say anything they wanted me to, thinking that if they like me, they won’t be mean or they won’t edit me bad,” she explained. “But it was the total opposite of that. They don’t care about you. You have a false sense that they do when you’re there, but of course they don’t.”
Holcomb also spoke about how editing made her look “creepy.” She claimed that on a particular date, Jesse Palmer was telling her that he wished he could spend more time with her.
“Well, they don’t show that. They don’t show that part,” she told the outlet. “So, we’re talking by the fireplace, and all I did was touch his chest a little bit. I’m kind of scratching his arm, being sweet. That’s it. But they make it look like I’m creepy-clawing him. Because they zoom in on my hand, super close.”
She went on to say, “But it was not creepy at all. And so then I was known as the creepy claw girl everywhere I went. It was horrible.”
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What happened between Jessica Holcomb and producer Sarah Gertrude Shapiro?
Shapiro fully admits that she misled and manipulated contestants on The Bachelor. She explained how she was instructed to make sure the rejected girls cried. “They’d often tell us to drive up and down the 405 until the girls cried — and not to come home if we didn’t get tears, because we’d be fired,” she told The New Yorker.
With Holcomb, she was allegedly awful. The former contestant recalled, “What I remember her saying was, ‘You’ve been very honest about all the girls here being so much prettier than you and skinnier than you and better than you. How does it feel to know that you were right?’”
Holcomb remembers Shapiro saying “the meanest stuff ever” until she was “crying because it hurt my feelings so bad” and that it was “humiliating.”
What happened to Holcomb after ‘The Bachelor’?
Holcomb said The Bachelor was terrible for her self-esteem. She was recognized everywhere she went and became known as “the creepy girl” which was obviously very difficult.
“And so I was very embarrassed by that. I freakin’ moved — I moved far away — soon after that. I just wanted a fresh start,” she said.
She also left her job as an attorney in San Antonio. “Well, after that, the writing was on the wall that I needed to go find another job. I was at a very prestigious, large law firm. They were fine with me going on the show, but I just didn’t look professional; it wasn’t good for them.”
She went on to say that it was “definitely not a good thing for my career.”
Even her family had a hard time with the after-effects. “My parents were completely humiliated, and my mom was like, ‘I can’t even show my face at church,’ she explained.
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