UNHAPPY ENDING
Fans fuming after Bachelorette picks controversial contestant,
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for The Bachelorette.
Just a few months ago, fans of the Bachelorette TV show were keen to see its newest star, Becca Kufrin, get a happy ending after a brutal televised breakup with Bachelor Arie Luyendyk Jr.
On Monday night, Kufrin got the ending she wanted, but it was far from happy for many fans.
That’s because Kufrin, 28, chose the man at the centre of a controversy that overhung most of the season: Garrett Yrigoyen, a 29-year-old medical sales rep from Reno, Nev.
Yrigoyen was outed in May for liking Instagram posts that mocked liberal women, transgender people, immigrants and Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg.
And though he apologized at the time “to those who I have hurt and offended,” the controversy lingered and tainted Monday’s finale, in which Yrigoyen proposed to Kufrin on a beach in the Maldives.
Many fans took to Twitter to express disappointment and anger over Kufrin’s choice.
One user wrote Kufrin “a word of advice: if your fiancé was liking posts mocking immigrants and school shootings, he feels that way about immi- grants and school shootings. His character deserved to be attacked and him making himself the victim is complete garbage.” Ashley Spivey, the former
Bachelor contestant who outed Yrigoyen, wrote: “Apologies are just words until people put in the work. I’m still not convinced he knows why those memes are so hurtful.”
The controversy followed the happy couple into a conference call with media on Tuesday morning. More than a third of the questions were about the Instagram likes.
Kufrin said Yrigoyen’s social media activity was “just a small sampling” of who he is. “I got to know him aside from social media and I got to know who he truly is as a person,” she said.
Neither of them had read the negative Twitter reactions to their engagement since they’d been caught up in a whirlwind of media appearances and interviews, but “I can only hope that people support my decision because, at the end of the day, I have to follow my heart,” she said.
On the live portion of Monday’s finale, Yrigoyen said that he “didn’t stand behind those likes and I was a better person than I was presenting on my social media.”
But reporters on Tuesday’s call weren’t taking that at face value. When Yrigoyen deflected a question about the post that mocked Hogg as a “crisis actor” by saying he was “trying to grow and be a better person,” the reporter persisted: “Does that mean you don’t believe David Hogg is a crisis actor?”
“No, I don’t believe David Hogg is a crisis actor,” Yrigoyen replied.
Another reporter asked for an example of how Yrigoyen was growing.
“I’m starting to read the posts now and going from there, whereas before I would just scroll through and double tap the image,” Yrigoyen replied.
But why was he even following those accounts, another writer asked, including one called The 4th American that says it supports the military, veterans, police, faith, family, firearms, freedom and, by the looks of it, President Donald Trump.
“I originally followed that account because I’m a patriotic guy and I love my country, and I support everybody in the military,” Yrigoyen said.
If the couple was annoyed by the repeated questions about the Instagram likes they did a good job of hiding it, which is perhaps not unexpected considering that before she joined the Bachelor franchise Kufrin worked in public relations.
She was on the winning side of controversy last March when ABC televised Luyendyk dumping her for his Bachelor runner-up in lingering, excruciating detail. He became public enemy No. 1 for the fans known as Bachelor Nation and Kufrin could do no wrong in their eyes.
After that go-round, Kufrin had to know the shoe would be on the other foot when she chose Yrigoyen over popular runner-up Blake Horstmann, a guy with a spotless social media profile as far as we know.
The bottom line is that whatever Yrigoyen truly believes, it’s now between him and Kufrin to figure out.