by Amy Kaufman
Flajnik was one of them. He told me how much Gale had helped him move past his grief over losing his father—a struggle he spoke about openly during his season.
“Elan was really instrumental in my life and talking through my feelings—whether it was for TV or not,” said Flajnik, who called from his home in San Francisco. “I looked at Elan as a therapist, almost. I enjoyed sitting down for multiple hours at a time with someone who would listen.
“I still genuinely value the time that we had together in talking about our lives and helping each other. Really,” he insisted. “I think that’s why we’ve maintained a friendship that’s more than just surface level and skin deep.”
Even Sharleen Joynt—who seemed well aware of Gale’s role in toying with her emotions during Galavis’s season—had mixed feelings about him. While she struggled to find common ground with many producers, he was the only one she really connected with. She relied heavily on Gale’s guidance when she decided to leave the show prematurely, following his advice about how to make a smooth exit. In her journal, Joynt wrote that Gale often told her she was his friend, “one of his favorites,” and reluctantly admitted that he’d become her “personal coach, therapist, and bodyguard.” “He’s nothing short of brilliant,” she wrote.
“I didn’t know how I was going to leave, and I was stressed out about it,” she said of planning her exit. “I was like, ‘America’s gonna hate me.’ And he said, ‘If you listen to what I say, America will love you.’ There was one time where I was crying and asked him to give me a tissue and he said, ‘No.’ I was like, ‘You’re just gonna let me cry like this?’ And he said, ‘Yes. America will love it.’ And he wasn’t wrong. Viewers love tears.”
While Joynt still harbors affection for Gale, Chris Bukowski has a harder time reconciling the producer’s actions. As you know by now, Bukowski has been on the show five times—so clearly, he’s somewhat of a glutton for punishment. He went on both Bachelor in Paradise and its now-defunct predecessor, Bachelor Pad, on which former contestants moved into the mansion to drink, hook up, and compete for a $250,000 prize.
The first time Bukowski went on Bachelor in Paradise, he suffered a knee injury and had to leave the show early. Even though he’d only been dating a girl he’d met on the Mexico set for a few days—Elise Mosca—he nonetheless asked her to leave the show and travel back to Chicago with him.
She obliged, and soon the couple was on a first-class flight back to Chi Town. Once they arrived, Bukowski quickly began fielding calls from Gale, who wanted to know how things were going between the lovebirds. The producer asked the couple to send him home videos of themselves “doing everyday things,” Bukowski said.
“Elan would call at midnight and be like, ‘How are you feeling about her? Do you think you would propose to her?’” Bukowski said. “I’m like, ‘Elan, I don’t know, man.’”
Despite Bukowski’s ambivalence about the new romance, Gale offered to fly him and Mosca back to Mexico. There, production would put them up in a local hotel suite until the final day of filming. That’s when Bukowski would propose to Mosca with a Neil Lane ring.
Bukowski didn’t feel great about the plan, but he didn’t know what else to do. After so many seasons on reality television, he’d badly tarnished his reputation—particularly on Bachelor Pad, where he hooked up with numerous women and seemed to have little regard for their feelings. If he proposed to Mosca, he reasoned, he’d look like a stand-up guy.
Back in Mexico, Bukowski had daily meetings with Gale in which the producer would urge him to seal the deal with a ring.
“All right, listen. Are you going to propose?” Bukowski said Gale would ask. “I flew out two rings. If you don’t do it, someone else is going to. Are you going to do it? You’ve got to do it. This is going to fix your image so much. America’s going to fall in love with you guys.”
Bukowski met with Neil Lane, who offered him a diamond to propose with. He took it back to his room for a night to mull over the plan, sleeping next to the ring box and a bottle of tequila.
“I’m thinking, ‘Holy crap, I’ve got to propose to this girl,’” he remembered. “So I called my mom. I’m like, ‘Mom, I don’t know. Should I propose to her? I don’t, like, love her or anything.’ She’s like, ‘Oh, son, do whatever you want. You have my support either way.’ At this point, she was probably just so tired of all this shit.”
It wasn’t the answer he was looking for, and his dad was no help either, advising him to just listen to his mother. Confounded, he told Gale he was ready to go through with the proposal.
“I knew, one hundred percent, there was no way I could be with this girl,” he admitted. “I couldn’t even stand her at one point. It was just so bad. But I honestly thought that me proposing to her and getting engaged on national TV was going to get people to forgive me for the way I acted in the past.”
The night before he was supposed to get down on one knee, Bukowski didn’t sleep a wink. Mosca—who was totally in the dark at this point—kept asking him what was wrong. When it was finally time to get up, he thought he was having a heart attack. And just when he thought he might vomit, he ran over to Gale and said he couldn’t go through with the plan.
The producer sat down with Bukowski for an hour, trying to get him to change his mind, telling him how close he was to the finish line. If he got engaged to Mosca, the happy couple could return to Bachelor in Paradise the following summer to show off their success story.
“I’m like, ‘Elan, I won’t be with her by next season,’” Bukowski replied. “I’d made up my mind. He could have fed me twenty drinks at that point. There was no way I was going to propose to her.”
As you might imagine, Bukowski doesn’t pop up on Gale’s Instagram feed these days. But plenty of other Bachelor contestants do, where the producer waxes poetic about the very same people he’s convinced to cry on-camera. He posts photos of himself hugging, carrying, and snuggling various cast members, some of whom he refers to as his “children.”
“I love everyone in this photo and if you say something mean about them I will kick you,” he captioned one 2016 snap of him and five ladies from Ben Higgins’s season.
You can see how this all gets confusing. Does Gale really count cast members as his friends, or is he just doing his job? Can both simultaneously be true?
“You have to draw this weird line where you’re kind of their friend, but you’re not their friend,” explained Hatta. “You do care for them, in a sense, because you’re learning all these things about them, and they’re human. But at the end of the day, you are making television. So if you know a guy’s going to break a girl’s heart, you can’t tell her. You have to build her up to where she’s like, ‘I’m gonna go on this date and tell him I love him!’ Telling her she has to give her all when you know he’s gonna let her go and you have to let it play out.”
And getting too close to a producer can prove dangerous. No one knows that better than Craig Robinson, whose romantic relationship with a Bachelor staffer cost him a reality TV career and her a job on the show.
After he was booted from Ali Fedotowsky’s season of The Bachelorette, Robinson—who worked as a lawyer in Philadelphia—began negotiations to appear on Bachelor Pad. That’s when he started talking to Karri-Leigh Mastrangelo, an executive producer who’d been with the Bach since its inception in 2002.
Mastrangelo was involved with casting Robinson on the second season of Bachelor Pad in 2011. During the casting process, he said, she began calling him every day, and the two started a flirtatious relationship. According to Robinson, Mastrangelo—who was married at the time—told him that he was the first cast member she’d ever been “interested in” and that she wanted to help him win the show.
“She was like, ‘You’re a lot smarter than these other people,’” he recalled. “I just kept thinking, ‘If I can go on the show and have her in my corner the whole time
, I could definitely win this thing.’”
After completing the requisite drug and STD testing, Robinson was set to appear on the show. About a month before filming was slated to begin, he planned a trip to Los Angeles to visit a college friend. When Mastrangelo found out he would be in town, Robinson said, she offered to pick him up from the airport. On the flight from Philadelphia to L.A., Robinson was so anxious that he “drank a ton,” and when he got off the plane, he immediately spotted the producer in baggage claim.
“She walks up to me and starts making out with me in the middle of baggage claim at LAX,” he told me. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, what the fuck is going on?’ And then she just basically didn’t go home the whole weekend.”
Mastrangelo did not respond to my repeated requests for comment. But according to Robinson, over the next three days, the two spent all their time together. Things got intimate, but they never consummated their relationship. And on his final night in town, Robinson and Mastrangelo decided to meet up with Elan Gale at a karaoke bar in the San Fernando Valley. The trio began drinking, and at one point, when Gale went to the bathroom, Robinson and Mastrangelo took the opportunity to kiss a bit. The make-out session lasted a little too long, though, because Gale returned and witnessed the two mid-lip-lock.
“So Elan looks at me and says, ‘What the fuck was that?’” Robinson remembered. “He’s like, ‘I’ve got to go home, because what I just saw was not right. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.’”
The following day, Robinson got a call from Gale, who told the contestant he was going to have to report the hook-up to Mike Fleiss. Mastrangelo was fired from the show, and Robinson was told he would no longer be a part of Bachelor Pad. He eventually returned to his law practice, and she has gone on to find other work in the television industry, working on programs like Celebrity Wife Swap. The two kept in touch for a while, Robinson said, but have not spoken in about three years.
At least the two suffered ramifications of an actual romantic relationship. Just a year before Robinson and Mastrangelo’s affair, Rozlyn Papa—a contestant on Jake Pavelka’s season of The Bachelor—was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a producer that she still claims never even took place.
It all began when Papa, who worked both as a model and a makeup artist, was filming introductory footage for the season. A producer named Ryan Callahan flew to Virginia to help production put together day-in-the-life footage of Papa and her son. Callahan was nice, Papa remembered, trying to ease her concerns about going on the show and telling her how great of a guy Pavelka was. She said this was the only time she ever spent alone with the producer.
Cut to the second week in the house. Papa said she wasn’t that into Pavelka, but otherwise, things in the mansion were par for the course. Then, just before a rose ceremony, Harrison pulled her outside to have a private conversation.
“This is something we’ve never had to deal with in the history of the show,” the host told her. “I am very sorry that we have to have this conversation. Rozlyn, you entered into an inappropriate relationship with one of our—with one of our staffers.”
Papa, looking flummoxed, remained silent.
“That staffer is no longer working with us,” Harrison continued. “Because of what happened, we feel it’s now impossible [for you] to then now form a meaningful relationship with Jake. Out of respect for everybody here, the girls, Jake, yourself. This is something that we take incredibly serious for everyone on the show. And we feel that there was a line that was crossed with our staffer.”
“I’m not gonna say anything,” Papa replied. “That puts me in a bad position.”
“The bottom line is this,” Harrison said. “We feel, because of what has happened, it’s impossible for you to continue on the show. And we feel that you need to leave tonight. Go pack your stuff and then there’s a van waiting for you.”
Reflecting on the exchange now, Papa said she was blindsided. She couldn’t process what she was being accused of. “It was like he was speaking Portuguese,” she said.
She was so embarrassed that she’d been asked to leave that she didn’t want to defend herself or beg to stay. Instead, she rushed to gather her things and exit as quickly as she could.
In the hours following her departure, her mind began to clear, and she became increasingly angry. She was taken aback that the production had fired Callahan, whom she’d viewed as a sort of confidant on-set. No one from the show ever clarified what was “inappropriate” about their relationship, which she still insists was never sexual.
That’s not what Harrison says, though. In numerous interviews as the season aired, he defined the relationship as “physical,” saying other girls on the show “saw it” and that Callahan “confessed more than once and to more than one person.”
As for Papa, the only odd moment she recalls between herself and Callahan happened after she received the first-impression rose on night one. Because the producer had encouraged her to pursue Pavelka—whom she wasn’t excited about initially—she was eager to show him the rose.
“I thought he would be really proud of me, so I took out the rose, like, ‘Look what I got!’” she said. “And he just scowled at me, turned, and walked away. I think my heart just sort of dropped at that point, because I couldn’t figure out why he was acting that way. Was he angry? Was he jealous? I think that there was definitely an interest on his end that hadn’t been expressed before—and it was not something that I thought much of.”
After she was sent home, Papa got in touch with Callahan. She said she was confused by what had happened, particularly because neither of them had given production any reason to think they were more than friends.
“And he said, ‘Well, that’s not true,’” Papa recalled. “‘I did talk to them, because they could just see it on my face that I really cared for you in a way that I didn’t care for the other contestants. And so I told them how I felt about you.’”
Callahan did not respond to my request for an interview. To this day, Papa is still upset that he never stood up for her, but she thinks he probably remained quiet in the hopes of saving his television career.
“You go on that show and you are meat for the grinder,” Papa said with a sigh. “One way or another, they’re going to make you good TV.”
The editing process, of course, is essential to shaping a narrative like this. And that takes place far from the mansion, done by staffers who never have any interaction with cast members.
It all starts with loggers—employees who watch raw Bachelor footage and transcribe it all, replete with time codes. Those transcripts are given to story producers, who give the editors a sense of what they’re looking for in an episode. The story producers break down each episode into acts. An act—which can be anything from a rose ceremony to an argument at the mansion—takes place between two commercial breaks.
Even when that outline is in place, editors are still able to access the raw footage—usually as much as 2,000 hours worth of it. And that can be crucial when it comes to “Frankenbiting”—one of the main techniques editors employ to create certain narratives. A “Frankenbite” is a sound bite that has been re-cut so that it has a different meaning. Let’s say the Bachelor says, “I do not want to go on a date with Trish.” If an editor took out the words “do not”—making the sentence “I want to go on a date with Trish”—that would be a Frankenbite.
“With editing, everything is malleable,” said one editor who worked on the show for three seasons. “You can make it whatever you want. You think, ‘Oh, she’s going to say something bitchy and we’ll use that.’ No, no, no. You make whatever she does bitchy.”
Even without Frankenbiting, there are ways to recontextualize scenes. Imagine that a story producer hands over footage from a one-on-one date between a woman and the Bachelor. The date went pretty well, but the editor is told by a story producer to make it seem like the couple we
nt on the worst date in history.
The date lasted three hours. Sure, the Bachelor and his lady had plenty of conversations, but the editor isn’t going to showcase any of those. Instead, he’s going to take the shots where they’re both sitting in silence. Maybe he’ll throw in one where the woman takes a prolonged sip of wine from her glass. Even though the Bachelor told his date, “We really have a lot to talk about,” the editor will Frankenbite the clip, turning it into “We don’t really have a lot to talk about.” And then that edited sound bite will be layered over footage in which you don’t need to see the Bachelor’s mouth moving—a shot of the ocean view, perhaps, or the tiramisu no one has touched.
And voilà! Instead of a three-hour gabfest, the date has transformed into twenty seconds of total awkwardness.
“I’m thinking, ‘This is what I want to happen.’ Then I make the footage tell that story,” the editor told me. “I don’t care what [actually] happens. It’s like I’m handed a big bucket of Legos and think, ‘What do I want to build today?’
“There’s no allegiance to what happened in reality,” he said. “The only things that are definitely happening are the rose ceremonies. The only other goal is entertainment, and that’s why the show is successful.”
Clare Crawley learned that the hard way. When she was on Bachelor in Paradise, editors made her the butt of a joke by making it seem like she was confiding in a raccoon. Yes, you read that correctly. After some house drama, Crawley went outside to cry and vent to someone—a fellow castmate, perhaps even a producer—but editing made it appear as if she were talking to a wild animal. Though the bit was clearly meant to be comedic, Crawley said she’s encountered many viewers who took the gag seriously.
“People message me and say, ‘You’re so psycho. I can’t believe you talk to raccoons,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘I’m the psycho one? Me, or the person who actually thinks that I talk to raccoons?’ People are clueless to editing.”