Colton Underwood led season 23 of The Bachelor, which aired in January 2019. To the people who may feel like he “misled” them, as Roberts put it, Underwood said, “I would understand why they would think that way. I’ve thought a lot about this too. Do I regret being the Bachelor? Do I regret handling it the way I did? I do. I do think I could’ve handled it better, I’ll say that. I just wish I wouldn’t have dragged people into my own mess of figuring out who I was. I genuinely mean that. But at the same time, I can sit here and say I’m sorry to all those women. I can also say thank you, because without them and without the Bachelor franchise, I don’t know if this would’ve ever came out.”
And to Cassie Randolph, the woman he picked on the show who later filed (and then dropped) a restraining order against him, Underwood says, “I’d like to say sorry for how things ended. I messed up. I made a lot of bad choices.”
Underwood says he was “in love” with Randolph, which only made his sexuality “harder and more confusing” for him. “If I’m being very honest, I loved everything about her,” he said. “And it’s hard for me to articulate what exactly my emotions were…. I, obviously, had an internal fight going on. I would just say that I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart…. I wish that I would’ve been courageous enough to fix myself before I broke anybody else.”
The morning he found out he was the Bachelor, he prayed to God and thanked him “for making me straight.” “I remember that vividly, saying, ‘Finally, you’re letting me be straight,’” Underwood recalled. “I’ve known that I’ve been different since the age of six, and I couldn’t process it and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was until high school, my freshman year, when I knew I was gay. And by that time I’d already grown up in the Catholic church, I’d gone to Catholic grade school, I’d learned in the Bible that gay is a sin. I had made mistakes in my sports and my athletic career, and when you make mistakes, ‘That play was gay.’ Gay was always affiliated with a connotation of negativity.”
Describing the reactions of the people he’s come out to, Underwood says, “I’ve had a range of responses, and the underlying, most common one is, ‘I wish you would’ve told me sooner.’ When I hear that, I wish I would’ve had faith in my friends and my family a little bit more. My dad, I told him, his reaction was, ‘I wish you would’ve trusted me sooner.’ But then he followed it up with, ‘How can I help you? How can I help take this off your plate? Who can I tell?’ To me, that was more meaningful than ‘I love you.’”
In the second part of his interview with Roberts, Underwood opened up about his “virgin Bachelor” label in the franchise. “The truth is I was a virgin Bachelor because I was gay,” he said. “And I didn’t know how to handle it.”
