Reality TV
Joan Tried To Return To The Golden Bachelor After Leaving The Show
She even had her flight booked.
Early Golden Bachelor front-runner Joan Vassos shocked Gerry Turner and viewers alike when she decided to leave the ABC reality series in Week 3. As Joan revealed in a new interview, however, a comeback was in the works, at one point.
Joan has been candid about leaving The Golden Bachelor to support her daughter, who had recently given birth and was experiencing postpartum depression while she was away filming. After returning home to the Rockland, Maryland, area, Joan was in the process of helping her daughter get “some mental health care” when the show’s producers phoned, she told TheWrap.
Mom Duty Called Again
“They said, ‘Do you want to come back?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to come back, let me see how I’m doing with my daughter,’” Joan told the outlet during the Women Tell All taping in late October. Eventually, production even booked her a return flight to go back to Bachelor Mansion and continue her journey to find love with Gerry.
Joan planned to resume filming “maybe four or five days” after she left. “And then my daughter wasn’t good again,” she said. “We just hadn’t made it far enough — I hadn’t gotten her a doctor yet; I had calls in but it just couldn’t unfold quick enough. ... It wasn’t in the cards.”
ABC filmed The Golden Bachelor in August, and since then, Joan’s daughter is doing much better. “Once a mother, always a mother, I’ll always choose my kids first,” she captioned an Oct. 13 Instagram post. “Thank you for all of your outpouring [of] love and support, for not only me but also my daughter - everyone is now healthy and happy!”
A Golden Future?
In the same Instagram caption, Joan continued, “As for me and my journey to love… guess we will have to see where it takes me next.”
Now, it seems Joan’s Bachelor Nation return might not be off the table, after all: Though ABC has yet to announce a Golden Bachelorette spinoff, Joan recently told Bustle she would be down to potentially co-lead the series with bunkmate Sandra Mason.
“I think that we would be good together,” Joan said, adding an early request for the lower bunk if she goes back. (She previously volunteered to sleep on the top bunk because Sandra’s knee replacement made climbing more difficult.) “[There’s] no animosity when something great happens to each other.”
