The Golden Bachelor runner-up Leslie Fhima has revealed if she got the closure she needed from Gerry Turner after the show wrapped filming.
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“I didn’t get closure from him, and I don’t know if anything he would’ve said would’ve really given me closure,” Leslie admitted during a recent appearance on the “Bachelor Happy Hour” podcast, which is co-hosted by Bachelor in Paradise couple Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt.
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On The Golden Bachelor, Leslie claimed Gerry had totally convinced her in the Fantasy Suite that she was The One and they were going to spend the rest of their lives together.
And so when Gerry eliminated Leslie in second place in her hotel room in Costa Rica, she sobbed and lashed out at Gerry for having misled, lied to, and broken her heart.
During the live After the Final Rose special that aired in late November, Leslie wanted to know why Gerry had ultimately picked Theresa Nist over her, but Gerry could only say that Theresa is “right” for him and a better fit for his life.
Leslie therefore questioned Gerry’s integrity and declined to accept his apology.
“I feel like I didn’t get a ton of closure with him, you know?” Leslie said on the podcast. “But that’s okay because I felt like I closed it with myself.”
Going into that emotional and difficult After the Final Rose conversation with Gerry, Leslie said she had been hoping for some real answers.
“It ain’t my first rodeo,” Leslie said, referring to heartbreak and not feeling chosen by men.
“And I’ve watched the show since conception… but you don’t really get a lot of closure. What can they say? They had to make a choice. It was his journey and his choice, but he could’ve chosen not to say those things to me.”
Leslie recalled of Gerry, “He said he wasn’t ready, that his heart wasn’t ready, or something like that. I kind of was glazing over at that point… He said something about choosing Theresa over me, and I thought that was a little harsh.”
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Leslie pointed out how Gerry could’ve been more empathetic or compassionate in his delivery when explaining how his heart suddenly led him toward Theresa in Costa Rica.
“He could’ve said that a little bit nicer,” Leslie acknowledged, “especially because being chosen is my [insecurity]. But I don’t know.”
“I know what I signed up for and I know that someone has to go,” the 64-year-old fitness instructor from Minneapolis, MN, concluded. “I just didn’t expect it to be so hard.”
But Leslie insisted that she has no regrets from her experience on the show.
“The only thing I would’ve like to… or I should have said is, ‘I THOUGHT you were a man of integrity,’ instead of, ‘You are a man of integrity,'” Leslie said on “Bachelor Happy Hour.”
She continued, “Because at the end of the day, he didn’t really have the integrity that I thought he had.”
When asked if she respects Gerry now that their relationship is over and done with, Leslie replied, “I mean, Gerry did what he did, it’s his journey. Do I respect him? I just wish he would’ve done it different.”
Leslie admitted of their brutal breakup, “I don’t respect what he did.”
Leslie said she “started” losing respect for Gerry due to the way he hurt his third-place finisher Faith Martin and then it got “a little more” worse for herself considering everything she had to go through in Costa Rica.
“So I feel like he just used, ‘I love you,’ too much,” she noted.
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Leslie told Serena and Joe that their question about respecting Gerry was such a hard one to answer.
“Because I want to say I do [respect him], but it’s hard. Yeah, he hurt me,” Leslie said.
Gerry definitely hurt Leslie, but she sought comfort in her supportive family and now seems ready to move on with her life and look for Mr. Right.
Gerry and Theresa, meanwhile, are still happily engaged, and they’re planning a January 4, 2024 televised wedding on ABC. They also intend to move to South Carolina together in the near future.
But Gerry has come under fire for allegedly having — and not being honest on the show or in the press about — a live-in girlfriend of nearly three years prior to applying for The Golden Bachelor.
Having had a three-year, live-in ex-girlfriend would contradict Gerry’s heart-wrenching The Golden Bachelor storyline about being a grieving widower who had little dating experience prior to the show because he was married for 43 years to Toni, who died from a bacterial infection in July 2017.
Gerry has since addressed the allegations against him, and Theresa also broke her silence on the unflattering report about Gerry’s alleged secret past.
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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.