Andy DehnartAn E! channel special on The Bachelor called The Bachelor: Then and Now was edited after its first broadcast to exclude interviews with Steve Carbone, aka Reality Steve, the man responsible for both spoiling recent seasons and relentlessly hammering the show for its repeated bullshit.
The special debuted a week ago on Wednesday, and early scheduled rebroadcasts didn’t air. When it was ultimately rebroadcast last weekend, comments from TV Divagal Delaina Dixon had replaced Steve.
Steve told me, “I haven’t spoken to E! yet but it’s obvious what happened. The mandate came down from ABC to get me off that show. Which is fine. They don’t like me because I ruin their show for everyone. But this is pretty extreme. Basically shows how much I am under their skin. If they didn’t care about me, they would’ve let that thing continue to air. I mean, what I say on my blog with spoilers and behind the scenes stuff is 100 times worse than what I said on that show. That show was essentially a fluff piece.”
The producer’s insistence that leaks constitute “just more promotion” are challenged by the fact that the special was edited to replace Steve’s not-exactly-critical commentary with similar comments from another commentator. In other words, it was the person saying them that presented a problem to someone. For example, here’s what Steve reports one of his lines was replaced with:
Steve: “Christi was our first bachelorette contestant in this show’s history to ever go full blown, stalker, ‘Fatal Attraction’ mode. I thought at some point she was gonna pull a rabbit out of a pot of water.”
Delaina: “By the second episode, Christi she was waaay too much into him. You know, sometimes you gotta dial it back girl, dial it back. And he actually said it was kind of a ‘Fatal Attraction’ case for him, so, luckily she didn’t boil any rabbits, so, that’s a good thing.”
I asked Delaina Dixon for comment, and she referred me to a Bachelor publicist. I pointed out that I wanted to know was why she’d agree to say essentially the same things someone else did, and she again referred me to the publicist. Neither the show’s publicist nor E!’s publicist for the special responded to requests for comment.