Bachelor alumni Brooke Blurton claims she felt pressured to disclose her bisexuality to the Honey Badger by her fellow contestants, in an eye-opening interview on Abbie Chatfield‘s podcast It’s A Lot.
In the interview, Brooke said she reluctantly told the Honey Badger (a.k.a. Nick Cummins) after feeling pressured by the other women vying for his heart, in particular frontrunner Brittany Hockley.
If you don’t remember the moment Brooke came out on Bachie, it was around the final ten mark of the 2018 season. The convo also seemed to include her assuring the Honey Badger that she would would eventually settle down with a man so she she could have children.
The moment garnered a mixed reaction from fans, with some celebrating even the slightest queer representation on commercial TV, while others were disappointed by the way her sexuality was sensationalised.
Is anyone else aggressively uncomfortable with the portrayal of Brooke’s bisexuality as this big evil secret that could undo their relationship? Do the producers know that’s not how bisexuality works? #TheBachelorAU
— Bella Skelton (@bellaskelton) September 12, 2018
Well, Brooke Blurton was disappointed by the edit, too.
In one of the frequent moments where the women were hanging out off-camera, she told the others that she’d had girlfriends before.
“That spread like wildfire around the house,” Brooke told Abbie on the podcast. “[But] no one cared! At the time, no one gave a shit.”
But there was a shift over time, to what Brooke claimed to be “little whispers” that she had an obligation to tell the Honey Badger the truth about her sexuality.
Brooke told Abbie that she confronted Brittany both on- and off-camera, but Britt denied the rumblings were coming from her. (The alleged conversation was never aired on TV.)
“I had a couple of wines because I was like, I’m so over this, this is annoying, it’s getting on my nerves really. Because it’s not a thing. If I want to tell him, I want to tell him. If I don’t, I don’t,” she told Abbie.
She added: “[Brittany] got so defensive about it. It was a pathetic discussion. It was a conversation that I didn’t really wanna have.”
Brittany told PEDESTRIAN.TV she felt “deeply saddened” to hear Brooke talk about the pressure she felt to disclose her sexuality.
“Brooke did approach me while we were filming about a rumour she had heard that I wanted her to openly discuss her sexuality. As I told Brooke at the time of filming and still firmly maintain, production were trying to push a narrative that I refuse to be a part of. I have never spoken negatively about Brooke or her sexuality as it’s simply a non-issue for me.”
She added: “I think Brooke is a wonderful person and a wonderful role model and I hate that she believes I have ever spoken negatively about her.”
Brooke Blurton told Abbie that her reluctance to talk to the Honey Badger about her sexuality had nothing to do with a feeling of shame, but simply because it’s actually no one’s business.
“I’m here on a show, dating a Bachelor, a male. It doesn’t really matter if I break up with him and I get back together with a girl, who cares?” she said.
Then, in terms of the edit, she noted that it was framed as “the biggest bombshell, big reveal, big secret, all this stuff”.
She described feeling frustrated that her expressing that she felt uncomfortable with the pressure to disclose her sexuality was then spun via the magic of editing into her feeling uncertain about being bi.
The whole ‘I’ll have babies with a man’ thing? Not a thing.
“[T]hey made me out that I was saying that I wanted to be with a guy and I would have a baby with a guy, making out like, oh, girls, can’t do IVF or whatever.”
Abbie herself shared that she felt pressured by the rest of the cast to share intimate details with her Bachelor, Dr. Matt Agnew, including about her abortion or her interest in open relationships.
She claims Helena Sauzier would often ask her if she told Matt about her sexuality.
“At that time I wasn’t even identifying as bi, I’d told them that I’d slept with girls,” Abbie said. “I’d be like, I just don’t want this to be a TV thing. I don’t want this to be like Brooke’s thing.”
She continued: “I don’t want it to be this big thing where it’s a reveal, because that’s, to be honest, a homophobic storyline.”
Helena Sauzier told P.TV that she personally would want to know if the person she was dating was bisexual.
“To be honest, if I was dating a man and we’d seen each other a few times, I would want him to tell me if he was bisexual or had previously been with men,” she said.
“That’s just personal preference, but I know a lot of the girls felt the same. Matt had come from a very religious and conservative family and it was a while into the show. I just thought it was something you should mention eventually.
“I would say ‘pressure’ is an overstatement. We were all chatting about it and that was my opinion. It’s a free world and at the end of the day it was her prerogative whether she decided to disclose it to Matt or not.”
What Abbie said bothered her the most about the pressure she felt from the other women was what she perceived as their real motive, which wasn’t exactly about being honest.
“It’s their issues in thinking that that would make you less appealing as a partner to him,” she explained.
“Why do I have to disclose all of my previous partners, my previous relationships, if you don’t? Because they’re women?”
Abbie summed up in one neat line why she was wary about disclosing her sexuality on reality TV: “I don’t want to make my sexuality a storyline.”
Being queer is not some salacious revelation to draw in more viewers. It’s just an ordinary part of Abbie Chatfield and Brooke Blurton’s lives.
Listen to the full It’s A Lot here, which also includes a rigorous discussion of Abbie rejecting Brooke when she asked her out. Dream Bachie couple imo.
