Peter Weber has confronted Chris Harrison about a moment that “completely destroyed” him while filming The Bachelor’s 24th season and whether producers intentionally hurt him to make drama.
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“You want to talk about one of the hardest parts I went through [on the show]? It was with you,” Peter, 32, told Chris, 52, during the Monday, April 22 episode of “The Most Dramatic Podcast Ever” podcast.
“Can I ask you a question? Are you allowed to answer stuff?” Peter continued.
“Hell yeah, of course,” Chris proudly replied given the former The Bachelor host had walked away from his job in June 2021 following his racism controversy with Rachael Kirkconnell during Matt James’ The Bachelor season.
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Peter shared how he’s “always wondered” something after taping The Bachelor’s 24th season, which filmed in late 2019 but aired in early 2020.
“The hardest part I ever went through, where I was just ready to concede, like, I have nothing left to give and strength is gone? [It] was the finale day, when we’re out at that really beautiful setup for the engagement… We drove for, like, an hour in the middle of nowhere [in Australia] to get there,” Peter recalled.
By this time, Madison Prewett had quit the show and Peter was planning to propose marriage to his The Bachelor winner, Hannah Ann Sluss.
Chris noted how Peter was “a mess” at the start of the Final Rose Ceremony, and Peter confirmed, “Yeah, well, what you told me completely destroyed me.”
Peter acknowledged how it made good TV and producers even used this clip to open up the season.
“I had been going through so much up to that point, and then you told me, ‘Hannah Ann now doesn’t know if she even wants to show up. [She] doesn’t know if she wants to come,'” Peter revealed.
“At that point, and I can be so brutally honest now, there was pressure and I probably should not have proposed to Hannah Ann, like, I can honestly say that. I got all caught up in it, for sure.”
Peter went on to share, “But when you were saying that to me, in my mind, I’m battling so much here of, ‘Is this the right thing to do? I feel so much pressure, I’m stressed out of my mind, I’m exhausted, you know, what am I supposed to do here?'”
“And then you told me that line about how she doesn’t even know if she wants to come now at this point, and that’s I think when I left.”
Peter admitted he “almost passed out” from that warning.
“You guys had to take me to one of the houses there to just lay in the bed because it was so hot outside as well,” Peter said.
Peter therefore asked if producers had told Chris to do that or if Hannah Ann actually told him that she was contemplating being a no-show at the Final Rose Ceremony.
“No. 1, she did not tell me. I did not talk to her. A producer would never allow me to talk to her,” Chris confirmed.
“One of the executive producers — there’s like three or four of them — [told me]. What would’ve happened then is I would’ve come into town, they would’ve told me probably day of, when I got there, ‘This is what’s happened. You need to go out there and tell Peter that this is what she said,'” Chris explained.
“Then… I would follow my heart and just try to help in any way that I could. So when I told you… it was, like, 110 degrees… and you were starting to get faint.”
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Chris reiterated how he had his “marching orders” and told Peter what producers had told him to say.
“Honestly, [I did not know] if it was true or false. I trusted them to tell me the truth,” Chris said.
Peter recalled how Hannah Ann did, in fact, show up, and so he’s always questioned whether that warning was real or made up.
“That would’ve hurt if that was done just for TV at that point. I would hope they wouldn’t have done that to me in that moment,” Peter explained. “That was the hardest part of the entire thing for me.”
Chris agreed it was “a gut-wrenching day.”
When asked if Peter ever confronted Hannah Ann about her mindset prior to the Final Rose Ceremony, Peter admitted there was “no footage” about it and he “briefly” touched upon it in conversation with his now ex-fiancee.
“I don’t think I ever really brought it up to her again after that because I just kind of put it behind me,” Peter explained.
“I think I vaguely asked and she was like, ‘No, they had me in one of the houses for a couple hours.’ She didn’t get into detail, and that’s on me. I don’t know actually why I didn’t dive into that more with her, but I was always curious.”
Chris said he always tried to do right by the show’s leads and not cross a moral boundary.
“There were times they’d try to push me too far or want me to do something inappropriate,” Chris acknowledged.
“If I felt like it was real and honest, even if it was tough, I would be okay with it. But if it crossed that ethical line… I’d be like, ‘No, I’m not going to say that on live TV. I don’t think that’s fair.'”
Chris recalled producers wanting him to be “harder and tougher” on Peter’s mother Barbara Weber, for example, during the live After the Final Rose special.
“Ironically, the term they used was ‘landing the plane,'” Chris told the commercial pilot. “You want to push the envelope as far as you possibly can but still land the plane… You want the turbulence and you want a rocky road, but you also want to land.”
Not long after getting engaged to Hannah Ann in Australia, Peter apparently realized he still had feelings for Madison and couldn’t give his fiancee his whole heart.
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Peter therefore broke things off with Hannah Ann and devastated her, only to ask Madison for another shot at dating. (Peter and Madison, however, called it quits only two days after The Bachelor: After the Final Rose aired in March 2020 on ABC, and she is now married to Grant Troutt, the son of Texas billionaire Kenny Troutt).
Hannah Ann previously said on the “Bachelor Happy Hour” podcast that Peter had asked for her blessing — when they were still engaged — to reach out to Season 15 The Bachelorette star Hannah Brown because he “needed closure” in early January 2020.
“I should have really picked up on the first red flag that you gave to me, was when you wanted to reach out to Hannah Brown to find closure with her,” Hannah Ann told Peter on The Bachelor finale in March 2020.
“So really, looking back at it, our engagement involved three women. Me, you still being in love with Madison and proposing to me and you needing closure with Hannah Brown. That’s three women involved in our engagement that I was completely blindsided to… Words of advice, if you want to be with a woman, you need to become a real man.”
“Alabama Hannah” later revealed she and Peter had slept together while The Bachelor’s 24th season was airing in February 2020.
The Dancing with the Stars winner and Peter had reunited at Bachelor in Paradise couple Dylan Barbour and Hannah Godwin’s engagement party before having sex at his parents’ house in Los Angeles, CA, that evening.
Hannah wrote in her memoir, God Bless This Mess — which was released in November 2021 — that the sexual encounter “just sucked” and it was “a poor decision” on her part.
Hannah Ann took to TikTok after the news surfaced and captioned a video, “Always trust your instincts ladies.”
In the video, Hannah Ann was lip-syncing and mouthed, “That was embarrassing. I really hope you’re embarrassed. Wow.”
Words then flashed across the footage that read, “When the tea officially spills…”
Hannah Ann didn’t name Peter or the former beauty queen directly, but she confirmed whom her post was intended for in the comments to her followers.
“Savage ain’t a bad thing every once in a while,” Hannah Ann wrote to one TikToker who praised her video, according to Us Weekly.
Another follower wrote, “God did you a favor Hannah,” to which the model and Tennessee native replied, “There Is a God.”
After Peter and Hannah Ann’s breakup, Hannah Ann moved to Los Angeles and eventually went public with her romance with NFL player Jake Funk in February 2022. The pair got engaged in January 2023.
For Peter’s part, he began dating Kelley Flanagan during the start of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. They had a pretty tumultuous romance that turned out to be an on-again and off-again romance.
During Peter and Kelley’s second attempt to be an item, they attempted to date privately until their final split in Spring 2023.
Peter has been the subject of dating rumors lately, but he confirmed on the “Off the Vine with Kaitlyn Bristowe” podcast earlier this month that he’s still “very single and ready to mingle.”
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About The Author:
Elizabeth Kwiatkowski
Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade.