I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends: Confessions of a Reality Show Villain

by Courtney Robertson

  The next morning one of Ben’s friends had to take me to the airport because Ben had work to do. The guy came to get me before the sun came up and dropped me off on the curb, even though my flight wasn’t for hours. It ended up being delayed and I sat in the airport for most of the day.

  So, Ben wouldn’t “let” me do Dancing with the Stars, and didn’t want to do any press—but without telling me he arranged for a free trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in exchange for promoting the resort, a favorite destination of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. A telling sign, right? I thought we were just going on vacation, but the first day we were there, Ben informed me that we had to take a few pictures and then we could have the rest of the time to ourselves. Did he make money from this setup? To this day I don’t know.

  Regardless, we had an amazing time together. It really felt like we were on our honeymoon. It was one of the rare times in our relationship—maybe the only time, come to think of it—we were completely alone for five days in a row. Ben, as painful as it was for him, attempted to relax as much as possible. We drank beer and sunbathed all day, and made love all night. We were super affectionate and intimate. We spent the whole trip holding hands and kissing.

  There were a couple of hiccups. First, he made the mistake of checking his e-mail after dinner the first night. A friend had forwarded a photo of In Touch Weekly’s latest cover; it was the photo of me naked in the bathtub that Dylan had sold to them for a few thousand dollars. The headline was about my “Dirty Secrets” and the rag promised nude photos (yep, there it was on the cover), details of a Playboy spread (never happened), and a boob job (unashamedly true).

  After the first story had come out, I’d fired off nasty texts to Dylan:

  Me: I can’t believe you’re selling stories about me.

  Dylan: I can’t believe you’d go on a show like that.

  Me: Just remember, there are two sides to every story.

  Dylan: Don’t you ever threaten me.

  Me: I just did.

  Dylan: Just leave me alone.

  Me: Same to you.

  This time I decided to ignore him. Though Ben never offered to beat Dylan up for me, he also didn’t freak out about the naked bathtub picture and was surprisingly supportive. “Can you sue that guy?” he asked. It felt like a turning point in our relationship. That no matter what garbage anyone threw at us, we were now a team and strong enough to get through it.

  The other issue was that after three days of being by ourselves, we were running out of conversation. That troubled me a little bit. Over drinks one night, we fell back on old reliable, reminiscing about The Bachelor. Ben, for some reason, brought up Nicki. “She was really cool,” he glowed. “When we were on her Hometown, I looked over at her and it was like I was with one of my buddies.”

  Seriously? Here we were, on our first vacation alone together and he’s fondly talking about an “ex” who treated me like crap. “Do you want to be friends with her?” I said, my voice trembling and on the verge of tears. “She wasn’t nice to me, Ben. And you were with her!”

  “We said we’d never talk about that,” he said quietly. That was a nondenial. I mean I wasn’t surprised. Ben made out with like sixteen of the eighteen girls who made it past the first Rose Ceremony.

  I pulled out the fiancé card he’d thrown in my face about Dancing with the Stars.

  “If you want me in your life, you cannot be friends with her.”

  “In all fairness, you talk about your exes a lot,” he said.

  “I think the reason I talk about them so much is that I want you to know the truth, that I have had good relationships.”

  “Okay, I got it,” he said and the conversation was dropped like an AT&T call.

  In the beginning of our relationship, the offers to make money were rolling in. I turned down a lucrative opportunity to endorse a diet pill company, because I thought it sent a bad message to young girls. Without telling Ben, I turned down $50,000 each for us to appear on VH1’s Couples Therapy because I knew he’d never agree to it. Ben had several secret meetings about doing a reality show about the wine business called Young Sonoma and signed on without telling me. Only after he agreed to do it did he ask me to be on it. I felt blindsided. Already bitter about his Dancing with the Stars ban, I told him I didn’t want to be on it. I told him that I thought it would create problems in our relationship.

  At the end of March, Ben and I had our first paid public appearance together for “Night of a Billion Reality Stars,” hosted by Svedka vodka, at SupperClub in L.A. Instead of staying with me at my place, which, unbelievably he’d still never seen, Ben went down to San Diego the night before the event to hang out with friends. When I picked him up at the train station, he looked like shit. I recognized a filmy haze around him and detected a scent of cocoa butter.

  “Did you go to a strip club last night?”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s written all over you.”

  At the event, we had to walk the red carpet together and a reporter asked Ben about our plans for marriage. It was the first time we’d been asked about setting a date since right after the show ended.

  “We’re taking it slow,” he said. “We’re engaged-dating.”

  I was shocked. What the heck was “engaged-dating”? I’d never heard him say that in my life. Either he made it up on the spot or had been thinking about it and neglected to fill me in on our new status. Silly me, I was under the impression that we were engaged to be married.

  I put that on the back burner as we entered the party. I rubbed elbows with Bravo Housewives Teresa Giudice, Kyle Richards, Brandi Glanville, and Gretchen Rossi, and sperminator Jon Gosselin. Dancing with the Stars pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy mingled with Mob Wife Angela “Big Ang” Raiola. And it was my first event as an official member of Bachelor Nation. I was introduced to Bachelorettes Ali Fedotowsky and DeAnna Pappas, and the adorable Stagliano brothers, the breakout stars of Bachelor Pad. Jesse Kovacs, from Jillian Harris’s season, was also there, wandering around looking extremely hot.

  Then I met Ashley Hebert, who I knew from a very reliable source had slept with Ben in her Fantasy Suite. My first impression, well, I was really surprised that she was so short. A lot of people look small next to me, but she was just a teeny tiny little thing!

  It was the first time Ben had seen her since their “After the Final Rose” taping, and they had a nice chat. “I’m sorry,” Ashley told Ben again. “I felt bad about it.” She was also very nice to me, but she had a nervous energy.

  So what’s it like to be in Bachelor Nation? It’s a private high school on steroids. There are cliques within cliques, politics and hierarchies to wade through, and at least one secret Facebook group where alums plan exotic vacations together. There are official Bachelor-sponsored parties and a lot of charity events organized and attended by alumni. Of course, there is a ton of intermingling, cohabitating, and shocking hookups. For instance, not many people know that Vienna Girardi and country-singing bad boy Wes Hayden had a thing after she broke up with Jake Pavelka.

  The Bachelor Pad franchise has been a breeding ground for cross-pollination as well. At least two of my cast mates have dated Polish pretty boy Chris Bukowski (Emily Maynard’s season). Rachel dated a Stagliano and Jaclyn dated Ed Swiderski. Lindzi dated her Bachelor Pad 3 costar Kalon McMahon (also from Emily’s season), but that went down in flames, too.

  As we all know too well, being on The Bachelor and/or Bachelor Pad doesn’t guarantee everlasting love. Several of the women who were on my season are still single: last I heard Jaclyn, Lindzi, and Jenna were still on the prowl. It’s a lot different for the guys though. They have women coming out of their ears after being on the show. They get stalkers and marriage proposals, and their mailboxes overflow with X-rated e-mails and tweets. One guy I know even got a request to strip at a bachelorette party.

  There is sort of an unspoken rule in Bachelor Nation that we don’t bad-mouth each other and keep it in the family.
Which is why it was so nasty when Trista Sutter trashed me on Twitter and Ben’s best friend Constantine Tzortzis wrote, “Never respect a girl who takes her clothes off” on his blog. And yet, in April, Ben dragged me to Atlanta to visit Constantine, which was really uncomfortable. We slept in his basement next to their other BFF from their season, bartender Mickey McLean. That was one of my biggest concerns about Ben. It seemed like we were never alone.

  By the time Easter rolled around, the honeymoon period was long gone and there were more serious problems. Before, my main concern had been the tabloids judging me, but now, I often felt like Ben was the one cutting me down. It was so blatant that I asked him if he’d studied a book called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, in which a guy insults, or “negs,” a woman to make her more vulnerable. Ben almost never complimented me and anytime I said I wanted to do something out of the norm, he’d poo-poo it and give me five reasons why I couldn’t. I told him I wanted to do a vegan cookbook and he laughed. I told him I wanted to write a memoir and he said, “Don’t you think you’re a little young to write a memoir? They’ll never let you write a book.”

  Ben also didn’t respect my modeling career, which was hanging by a thread after the show. He didn’t understand that part of my job is to take care of my appearance, which meant going to the gym, getting a facial, or getting my nails done. When we’d be apart, he’d call me and ask, “What are you doing today?” When I told him, he rarely liked the answer. He seemed annoyed and resentful. “Why don’t you do something dynamic? Why don’t you paint? Why don’t you go to a museum?”

  He’d also quiz me about my financial situation, which was not great at this point. “I thought I fell in love with a successful model and I’d get to travel with you,” he complained once. I needed him to be understanding of my situation and support, not criticize, me. I was still living off the Ketel One residual and building up a little bit of credit card debt. But I wasn’t too worried yet. I knew if I booked one good job, I could pay it off completely. “You’re too young to have credit card debt,” he’d lecture. “We need to talk about your spending.”

  My spending? How about his spending? While the show had only given me a small amount after the finale to cover some bills, Ben made much more. He’d also made more than $1 million from an online marketing company he sold when he was younger, but he’d blown a lot of the money living large and traveling all over Europe. So, it’s not like he was as fiscally prudent as Suze Orman or something. He always bought himself nice things, especially cars. He’d recently won $5,000 gambling in Vegas and used it to buy himself a used Jeep Cherokee, even though he already had a new BMW and would buy another vintage BMW during our relationship.

  I was also having money issues because I was constantly paying to fly up to San Francisco. That was the only way I’d get to see Ben. He hadn’t once made a special trip to L.A. to stay with me, and he had not yet offered to pay for even one of my plane tickets to see him.

  I almost always went to him. For Easter, Ben threw a big party for about twelve of his friends on a ranch/winery near Solvang, California. Because that’s what people do on Easter. They party really hard.

  As usual, Ben spent more time hanging out with his friends by the grill than by my side. At one point, he blasted a rap song he had made between the Bachelorette and the Bachelor seasons. Apparently he was so horny because he wasn’t allowed to hook up with anyone that he channeled his sexual energy into a vulgar song (and video) called “Cream Dreams.” Yes, it’s about exactly what you think it is. He obviously was trying to emulate Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake’s “Dick in a Box,” but Ben’s song wasn’t clever, brilliant, or even funny really.

  You can Google it, but if you don’t want your ears or eyes to bleed, just picture Ben naked in a bed with lotion and a box of Kleenex, singing:

  Well, if you just let me fuck you right

  I can be your cream dream every night

  My dick can fulfill your bedtime fantasies.

  It really turned me off, but I just put on a happy face whenever he played it because he was so proud of it.

  You may be asking why I was still with Ben. It’s hard to explain. On one hand, I did really love him. We had that unexplainable connection and I wanted to get married. On the other hand, I kept learning new things about him that I really didn’t like.

  * * *

  KEEPING IT REAL

  Confessions of a Villain

  by Michelle Money

  While filming the show, I was absolutely true to myself. I am a confident woman. I am sarcastic. I am not easily offended. I have no problem making friends with girls. I am not dramatic. I don’t take life too seriously. I know who I am, which is the furthest thing from a villain.

  I decided to go on Bachelor Pad 2 to show America the real me. It was a huge risk, but in the end, my dad, who was battling the later stages of colon cancer, convinced me to do it. And it was the best thing I could have done.

  Graham Bunn was my partner from the start. He still is to this day. He saved me. He helped America look at me with different eyes. While the show was airing, my sweet father passed away from cancer. It was Graham who came to my side through all the heartache. He and his company helped me raise money and awareness for colon cancer. He taught me how important it is to give back and do good in this world. I’ve now raised $200,000 for the Chris4Life Colon Cancer Foundation. I look at being a villain as a huge blessing to me now. Do I wish I could have been remembered in a different way? Yes. But I am happy people remember me. It gives me an opportunity to talk about much more important things then reality TV! And people listen. And since I have your attention, please remember to get your colonoscopy by the age of fifty, if not sooner. It can save your life!

  * * *

  In mid-April, we took a trip to the East Coast together to see Ben’s friend, who played for the Boston Red Sox, and to see his grandma, who was very sweet and lived in Connecticut. We also went to NYC to attend the launch party for Mark Zunino’s wedding gown collection for Kleinfeld Bridal. Ben was rude to the organizer, who was my friend, and barely said thank you when he was given a custom suit. He was so used to getting free stuff by now that he didn’t think anything of being handed something so extravagant.

  We had dinner alone at Benjamin Steakhouse in Grand Central Terminal but the sparks weren’t flying. We had very little to say to each other, other than recapping the trip or talking about the food. Kris Humphries, who had just broken up with wife Kim Kardashian after seventy-two days of marriage, was at a nearby table and I remember feeling a kinship with him for some odd reason. Maybe it was because we were both in made-for-TV relationships and both got the raw end of the deal.

  Making matters worse, Ben sprung it on me that he’d arranged a double date with Ashley and her fiancé, J. P. Rosenbaum, who lived in New Jersey, on our last night of vacation. I was so disappointed. The mush in me wanted to explore New York City alone with Ben like in a romantic comedy: a walk through Central Park, maybe he’d spring for a carriage ride, kissing at the top of the Empire State Building. Instead, Ben spent our last morning in the hotel lobby on his laptop and we spent our afternoon at French Connection so he could buy a pair of socks.

  So when I heard about J. P. and Ashley taking over our final evening, I snapped. “I think it’s weird that you want to hang out with them,” I told Ben.

  “It’s not a big deal. I’m good friends with J. P.!” he snapped back.

  “Well, it’s weird for me,” I said.

  Clearly, I had no say in the matter. That night we met the couple for cocktails at Mulberry Project on the Lower East Side. Ashley, like the last time I met her, was still a miniature bubbly Energizer Bunny. She was very handsy and playful with J. P. and kept slapping him in the face with a french fry and pinching his cheeks. His eyes would twinkle and he’d just smile that Cheshire Cat grin that could melt butter.

  Not to be outdone, Ben was very handsy with me and I felt like we were in
the middle of a cute-couple competition. I really did not want to be there and I was grateful we were only having one drink with them before they left to go to another dinner. But then Ben invited them to our next spot, my favorite restaurant, Freemans. Ugh. Fine.

  Once we all got to Freemans, Ben had another surprise for me. He’d also invited his manager, a college friend, and his cousin to dinner. Everyone ordered a ton of food and Ben, acting as sommelier, made a production of choosing an expensive bottle of wine. “Babe, this is sexy,” Ashley said to J. P. “I wish you knew more about wine.” I thought it was a little inappropriate, but J. P. just laughed it off. They left after a glass.

  When the check came, after rounds of drinks, appetizers, and entrées, Ben looked at me and mouthed, “Should we split this?” I was so pissed off. These were his friends and he had the gall to make me foot half the bill, which was more than $800! I was already annoyed that he’d let me pick up the tab for the hotel. I didn’t want to make a scene in the restaurant in front of his friends, so I tossed my card down.

  After dinner, we went dancing at a club with Ben’s entourage. Ben ignored me all night and kept disappearing into the crowd. He was wasted and as we walked back to our hotel, he got the munchies. We ordered pizza and meatballs from one of my favorite late-night spots, and sat on a nearby stoop to wait for our food.

  “You look so sexy,” he slurred. “I love that you know your way around this city.” Finally, Ben had complimented me. But he was drunk and it was too little, too late for damage control. I couldn’t wait to be away from him.

  At the end of the trip I went to the airport alone, which was fine by me because we were recognized more when we were together. Sometimes when Bachelor viewers spotted us they’d follow us. Ben hated this side effect from being on the show and often told me, “Pick up the pace,” so we could lose curious fans. We couldn’t avoid everyone though. Every time we were asked to take a picture with fans, Ben would clam up and leave it to me to chat with them and be friendly. I never minded taking pictures. I appreciated anyone who supported us, and I knew it wouldn’t last forever.