REALITY CHECK

Former Bachelor Producer Tells All: Sarah Gertrude Shapiro reveals what it’s really like to work on the hit series

UNREAL creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro reveals all to In Touch about her time as a producer for The Bachelor

S he had reached her breaking point. In 2005, after three years as a producer on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro begged her bosses to fi re her. “I thought, I’m done. I have to get out of here,” she recalls. But it wasn’t because of the grueling hours or exhausting physical demands — it was the mental toll from The Bachelor. “The amount you have to torture women,” Sarah tells In Touch, “was unbearable.”

Sarah says she was paid to manipulate contestants for story lines. “I was playing on women’s weaknesses,” explains the 38-yearold California native, who has taken her dark experience and turned it into TV gold with UNREAL, the scripted Lifetime series she co-created that exposes the morally questionable actions of the producers of a fictional dating reality show. “Women on The Bachelor are basically in a CIA torture chamber with no phone, internet, friends or family and just one guy they don’t know much about who’s like a God figure. I was a hard-core feminist — it was the worst job for me.”

She didn’t land the gig by choice. Originally hired for another reality program, Sarah says she was later forced to work for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette because of a contract she’d signed. Her beef was never with the stars of the show: “It wasn’t about them,” she says. “Bob Guiney [season four Bachelor] was really fun. I always really liked Meredith Phillips [season two Bachelorette], and Jen Scheff t [season three Bachelorette] was cool.”

She felt bad for women who had come to find love, not fame. “You can say people know what they’re signing up for, but back then, I don’t think they did,” says Sarah, who eventually got out of her contract by moving to another state. “You can’t understand the power of editing. There are a lot of really smart people making these shows.”

When she finally quit, she’d sworn off Hollywood for good. But a decade later, she couldn’t be happier working on UNREAL. “My daily life used to consist of coming up with romantic dates and making girls cry,” she says. “Now I sit in a writers room with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met and come up with stories I love and work with these great actors. It’s my dream job.”

— Reporting by Diana Cooper