The Bachelor franchise hasn’t always been the most inclusive, which former The Bachelorette star Rachel Lindsay has pointed to again following a controversial interview with host Chris Harrison.
Now, Lindsay has spoken out Harrison’s remarks regarding race, saying that she won’t renew her contract with the franchise once it’s over. She’s the host of a Bachelor Nation podcast and sometimes still appears on episodes of the series.
“I’m fucking tired. I’m exhausted. I have truly had enough,” Lindsay said on the most recent episode of the Higher Learning podcast. “My entire reason for doing The Bachelorette—and I was lucky that it worked out for me in the most beautiful way in finding Bryan—is that I wanted to be representative as a Black woman to this audience. And I wanted to pave the way for more people to have this opportunity,” she said. “In some ways that has happened. I wanted the franchise to be better. I have a love-hate relationship with it. I’m connected to it. It did stuff for me, and I’ll never forget that.”
Lindsay was the first-ever Black lead on the 2017 season of The Bachelorette, where she met her husband Bryan Abasolo. Lindsay is also an attorney, as well as a correspondent on Extra. Last summer, as ongoing protests spread across the U.S., she said she would walk away from the franchise if they didn’t case a Black Bachelor. Days later, the show announced its first Black Bachelor, Matt James.
“But how much more do I want to be affiliated with this?” Lindsay said on the podcast. “How much more can I take of things like this? I said I was gonna leave if they didn’t have leads of color. Okay, they did that, and they made some other changes. They hired a diversity consultant—who didn’t attend the class? Did Chris Harrison not sit through that? I’m confused as to how you could have whole consultants working for you, yet what happened just happened.”
Harrison’s comments arrived after photos emerged of a frontrunner contestant, Rachael Kirkconnell, going to an antebellum plantation-themed fraternity formal in 2018. She also purportedly liked images on social media that included the Confederate flag. She apologized on Thursday, saying that her “ignorance was racist.”
During Harrison’s interview with Linsday, The Bachelor host appeared to defend Kirkconnell and dismiss “cancel culture.” His comments sparked a backlash, with Harrison later apologizing for the “harm” he caused by “wrongly speaking in a manner that perpetuates racism.” He also apologized to Lindsay.
Lindsay told the podcast that she and Harrison spoke privately after the interview and she is thankful for his apology, but is “having a really, really hard time, reasoning, or really taking in and accepting this apology.”
