Andi Dorfman had some alternative phrases for The Bachelor producers after Rachel Lindsay deactivated her Instagram account amid bullying for her interview with Chris Harrison.
The former Bachelorette, 33, addressed the controversy in an interview with Entertainment Tonight on Friday, March 5, revealing that she thinks Bachelor Nation “dropped the ball.”
Dorfman instructed the outlet, “I don’t know how you let somebody like Rachel Lindsay get bullied off her own social media account without stepping in and saying things earlier. I don’t know how you kind of hide behind all of that. [When] your cast and your contestants are the ones that are having to come together without you, where is the franchise in all of this?”
The Georgia native added, “I think they’re scared. I think the franchise is scared.”
Lindsay, 35, stop Instagram on February 26, weeks after her Extra interview with the Bachelor Nation host, by which he defended Bachelor contestant Rachael Kirkconnell‘s previous racist actions. She defined her choice to step away from the account throughout an episode of her “Higher Learning” podcast with Van Lathan on Tuesday, March 2.
“I saw something negative and I said, ‘You know what? Not today, not even this weekend,’ and currently still not now because I’m still disabled. It was the best decision that I could do for myself to detach from that negativity,” she stated. “I needed that. I feel so much better. I’m not 100 percent, but I feel lighter.”
She resurfaced on the platform on Saturday, March 6, with a photograph of a bouquet of sunflowers and an uplifting caption.
“‘I want to be like a sunflower so that even on the darkest days I will stand tall and find the sunlight,’” Lindsay wrote.
Harrison, for his half, apologized throughout a Thursday, March 4, look on Good Morning America. He additionally addressed the harassment Lindsay has confronted after calling him out, asking followers to cease “throwing hate” her means.
“I am an imperfect man, I made a mistake and I own that,” he stated in the course of the interview. “I believe that mistake doesn’t reflect who I am or what I stand for. I am committed to progress, not just for myself, also for the franchise. And this is a franchise that has been a part of my life for the better part of 20 years and I love it.”
Harrison beforehand apologized for asking followers to have “grace” towards Kirkconnell after she “liked” pics with the accomplice flag within the background and attended an antebellum-themed social gathering at a former plantation in 2018. “I am saddened and shocked at how insensitive I was in that interview with Rachel Lindsay,” he stated on GMA. “I can’t believe I didn’t speak against antebellum parties, what they stand for. I didn’t say it then and I want to say it now: those parties are not OK, past, present, future. And I didn’t speak from my heart. And that is to say that I stand against all forms of racism, and I am deeply sorry to Rachel Lindsay and to the Black community.”
The Texas native has been working with creator and educator Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, who got here to Harrison’s protection throughout an interview with Entertainment Tonight this week. The Long Time Coming: Reckoning With Race in America creator stated the Bachelor Nation host, who introduced final month that he was quickly stepping again from the franchise, has been placing within the work and deserves a second likelihood.
“I think as a host, it’s extremely important for him to have been through this and to be even more deeply sensitized to the issues of race, to the issues of conflict, with history and the present, and how the franchise can embody some of the best ideals and the norms that he has now taken to,” Dyson instructed ET. “The perspectives that he now has — and I think he will be all the better for it — and I think quite frankly, the show will be all the better for it as well.”
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