‘The Bachelorette’: Rachel Lindsay says she dealt with a racist contestant

Rachel Lindsay, a former leading lady on “The Bachelorette” who has criticized the TV dating franchise for its lack of diversity, says she had to put up with a racist contestant during her season on the show.

“I did have a racist contestant on my season,” she said during an appearance on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live” Wednesday night.

Lindsay, who became the franchise’s first Black Bachelorette in 2017, declined to name the contestant, but claimed ABC and the show’s producers “didn’t do a good job of vetting out” the man. She hopes the process improves for Matt James, who was recently cast as the first Black man to lead “The Bachelor.”

“(It’s) one of the things that I’m fighting for for Matt James as the first black Bachelor, for them to do a better job at vetting contestants,” she told host Andy Cohen. “You need a person of color in the decision room making decisions so that doesn’t happen to them.”

Lindsay said she experienced other forms of racism during her season — some of it coming from viewers of the show.

“From the audience. I definitely experienced it,” she said. “More so when it came to picking the men, and then at the end, my husband (Bryan Abasolo) is Colombian, so I got a lot of racism towards the fact that we were in an interracial relationship. Just a lot of nasty messages, trolling.”

Lindsay has been outspoken when it comes to the lack of diversity on “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette.” Earlier this month, she said in an interview with AfterBuzz that she would no longer continue her affiliation with the franchise if changes aren’t made.

“When you’re putting out something that is very whitewashed and doesn’t have any type of color in it and you’re not trying to be effective and change that … I think that they have to at this point, give us a Black Bachelor for season 25,” Lindsay said.

After the casting of Matt James was announced last week, Lindsay expressed both excitement and frustration when discussing the move.

“Don’t get me wrong. It is lovely that there is a black Bachelor. It is great, but let’s get in to the but,” she said on Juliet Litman’s podcast Bachelor Party. “… It’s a Band-Aid. It’s the easiest thing, to me, that you can do and I hate that it’s in response — or it seems like a knee-jerk reaction to what happened in our society, what happened with George Floyd and the pressure that you’re getting from society.”

Lindsay went on to add that it’s as though “a man had to die in such a gruesome and public way for us to get a Black Bachelor.”