According to an excerpt of the book Bachelor Nation published in the New York Post, contestants who apply for The Bachelor most often get rejected for something fairly common: They have herpes. Kaufman writes that in the auditioning process, contestants undergo a medical examination, during which they are tested for sexually transmitted infections. For a show that revolves around love and heavily implied sex, this seems important. (The "implied sex" part of season 22 happened Monday night.) And, according to Ben Hatta, a former assistant to showrunner Mike Fleiss, herpes is the main reasons contestants are barred from entry.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
"Sometimes you’d be the first person to tell a contestant that they had herpes. You’d be like, ‘Uh, you should call your doctor.’ Why? ‘We’re not going to be able to have you on our show, but you should call your doctor,'" Hatta says in the excerpt.
Seeing as one in six Americans has genital herpes, according to the Center for Disease Control, this isn't all that surprising, and it seems prudent of production to look into the medical histories of people who will live in isolation for up to three months.
More disturbing is the fact that contestants are given psychological tests — perhaps a way of determining who would be a "loose cannon."
"You’d know there’d be a possibility of [someone] being kind of unhinged — like, she passed, but just barely. You can see it at the casting events during the interviews: ‘Oh, this chick is going to go fucking nuts. She’s amazing,'" ex-producer Michael Carroll admits. Ah, there's that psychological manipulation that UnREAL warned us about.
Bachelor Nation, will arrive on bookshelves March 6, the day after the Bachelor finale episode.
Read These Stories Next: