A contestant on The Bachelorette is under fire yet again for views expressed on social media, and while ABC is apparently looking into it, the situation this time is rather tricky.
Just after 29 year-old Garrett Yrigoyen was shown receiving the first impression rose from new Bachelorette Becca Kufrin during Monday’s premiere, screenshots surfaced that showed what appeared to be his Instagram account “liking” some offensive posts, including some disparaging women and the transgender community and accusing Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg of being an actor.
Last season of The Bachelorette, contestant Lee Garrett was found to have posted a bunch of racist and otherwise extremely offensive tweets, comparing the NAACP to the KKK, for example. A couple of days after the tweets were exposed, Chris Harrison tweeted, saying “For those asking, no, of course we didn’t know about the offensive tweets from Lee’s account. None of us were aware of them[.] Very unfortunate.”
While Lee was not a frontrunner and would likely not get very far with the franchise’s first black lead with gross views like that, the controversy still showed ABC that they needed to be a lot more diligent about their contestants and their social media activity.
“We’ve made a really really big effort to make sure things like that don’t happen, and we start scrubbing social media accounts,” ABC Senior VP Robert Mills told Entertainment Tonight, but even that “really really big effort” couldn’t keep up with the fans who knew you could easily check on a social media user’s liked posts.
“In the case of the Garrett thing, first of all…it’s an alleged account, and it’s likes, it’s not things he’s actually posted, which are things you actually can’t scrub unless the person has a certain number of followers,” Mills says.
The current controversy is rather different from the one surrounding Lee Garrett. No actual offensive posts by Garrett Yrigoyen were found, only offensive posts he had allegedly “liked” on Instagram, and he’s not trying to win the heart of the franchise’s first black lead.
He’s also the current season frontrunner, based simply on the fact that The Bachelorette has a history of first impression rose winners doing extremely well. Kaitlyn Bristowe, JoJo Fletcher, and Rachel Lindsay all ended up engaged to the guy they gave their first roses to, and all three couples are still together. Andi Dorfman gave hers to Nick Viall, who at least made it to her final two.
So if history is any indication, Garrett most likely makes it pretty far into Becca’s season, and if he’s one of the guys she ends up having a real relationship with, this isn’t just a matter of ABC or anyone involved with the show making a statement condemning the posts he liked. It’s a lot more complicated than that, even if only because they can’t spoil their own season to let us know how far he gets, and therefore how much this matters.
Becca herself, who has commented on the controversy both to E! News and other outlets, can’t say much, because how she feels about this whole situation depends on a lot of factors (not to mention her own social and political views). If Garrett doesn’t make it far, it doesn’t really matter either way. But if she’s now engaged to him, it’s a whole different ball game, and a whole conversation that couple now has to have on their own. Either way, “spoiling” the end of the season is a big no no, even when spoilers are readily available online.
Becca probably ended up saying all that she could really say.
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and at the end of the day, I wanted to go on this journey to open up…
