The scandal that shook Bachelor Nation! Former Bachelor in Paradise star Blake Horstmann reflected on his decision to release private text messages from Caelynn Miller-Keyes back on August 6. Although he confirmed that it wasn’t an easy move, he said he felt like it was the only way to tell his side of the story during an interview on the upcoming September 25 episode of the “Bachelor Happy Hour” podcast.
“Caelynn, you know, she used the word ‘premeditated.’ And premeditated is just a fancy way of saying, ‘I thought really hard about it’ because I did,” he confessed to cohosts Rachel Lindsay and Ali Fedotowsky in an episode preview shared by Entertainment Tonight about posting their intimate conversation on Instagram. “It was such a hard decision for me. That night, when I released those text messages, I was breathing into a paper bag. It was incredibly difficult for me.”
At the time, Blake claimed that his “name and character [were] being attacked” by Caelynn on the beach in Paradise. On the show, she accused him of ghosting her after they slept together at the Stagecoach Music Festival — the now-infamous event where he also hooked up with Kristina Schulman. The former Bachelorette contestant from Becca Kufrin‘s season received a lot of backlash from his costars for the shady move during the Paradise reunion on September 17, where he resisted apologizing to the beauty queen.
Many of Blake’s friends from the franchise, including Kevin Wendt, Dean Unglert and even Caelynn herself, claimed that the stud reached out to them to get their opinion before posting. “A lot of people, they didn’t even really say, ‘No, don’t do it.’ They were like ‘If you do it, know what the consequences are’ … and there were a few that were like, ‘The things she’s saying, you have to do it. I don’t see any other choice,'” the Colorado native explained. “I wanted to see if anybody else had any other ideas. I wanted to see if there was any other avenue I could take. And at the end of the day, as hard as it was, I felt like that was the only thing I could do to get my truth out there.”
Whether you’re #TeamBlake or #TeamCaelynn, this scandal will definitely go down in Bachelor history.