Erica Rose is opening up about a painful experience on Bachelor Pad. During an appearance on the Unpopular With Jacques Peterson podcast, the 38-year-old Bachelor Nation alum recalled having eggs thrown at her during a challenge on the second season of the spinoff series in 2011.
During the challenge, contestants were asked questions like, “Who are you least attracted to?” by then-host Chris Harrison. The questions were answered by throwing a paint-filled egg at their blindfolded pick. When the men threw the eggs, the women were in string bikinis; when it was the women’s time to throw, the men were shirtless.
At one point during the challenge, eventual co-winner Michael Stagliano launched an egg at Rose.
“It really hurt. That was when I was like, ‘Ow. I don’t want to do this anymore,'” Rose, who first appeared on Prince Lorenzo Borghese’s season of The Bachelor before two stints on Bachelor Pad, recalled. “Emotionally, yeah, it was traumatic, but physically, that fking hurt… I walked off and I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. This is, like, abusive. It’s not just my feelings are hurt, but that fking hurt.'”
“… They did tell the guys, ‘You can’t throw it as hard.’ The point of the game wasn’t to injure people. It was to humiliate them, I guess,” she added. “… They didn’t throw it as hard [after that].”
ET has reached out to Harrison, Warner Bros. and ABC for comment.
Rose claimed that, during the challenge, Harrison, who recently departed the franchise following a racism controversy, “said to me, which I’m sure he was told to say whatever, but either way he said it to me, ‘If you don’t finish this challenge and let the eggs keep getting thrown at you, you’re going to be eliminated.'”
Rose said she decided to push through and finish the game since she was there competing for $250,000, but noted that “the damage had been done.” Rose became upset later in the season, though, when, she claimed, people were allowed to sit out of another challenge without consequence.
“What upset me was that I was told if I didn’t finish that challenge, I’d be eliminated. And then a couple weeks later, it was the kissing contest and they let Michelle Money and a few other people, I think, sit that one out because they were parents and so they didn’t feel that was appropriate,” Rose alleged. “I felt like for sure on that show it was also playing favorites in that regard.”
Following her experience on the second season of Bachelor Pad, Rose, who said she was “definitely in shock,” decided to return for the third season of the reality series.
“I didn’t even really process it at all. I just came back to my normal life. And then for some reason I was such in that mentality that I thought, ‘The only way to fix this is to go on Bachelor Pad 3,'” she explained. “Somehow that’s what I was convinced. That’s why I did Bachelor Pad season 3, was that I really believed that somehow the way to work through that issue that I had from doing it was going to be going back on Bachelor Pad 3. I needed to find a relationship on that show. That was what I really believed ’cause I was, like, brainwashed, I feel like is the best way to say it.”
Following her second stint on Bachelor Pad, Rose said she began “feeling really upset and feeling really depressed, actually, for the first time in my life,” which prompted her to go to therapy. It was in therapy, Rose said, where she “realized that I had a little bit of PTSD, actually, from my time on the show.”
“…. The only people there to talk to about your feelings was an actual producer, who was not someone, really, to confide in because anything you’re confiding to them, they’re recording it and putting in on camera,” she added. “So definitely I was in shock. Looking back at that year was really weird for me.”
In 2016, after Rose’s Bachelor franchise appearances, she and her now-ex welcomed a daughter named Holland. The former reality star went on to tie the knot with her husband, Charles Sanders, in 2017. The pair welcomed a daughter, Aspen, the next year.
