‘Bachelor’ Producers Track Menstrual Cycles To Manipulate Contestants And Push Emotions, Former Producer Says

The drama viewers see on The Bachelor doesn’t come easy, a former producer claims.

In order to get emotional soundbites and encourage women to fall more deeply into their feelings for the contestant, producers pull all kinds of tricks to manipulate them, including tracking their menstrual cycles to push them toward the edge, former producer Ben Hatta said in a new tell-all book.

Hatta was interviewed by Amy Kaufman for the book Bachelor Nation and revealed some of the tricks producers play to get more dramatic scenes. As Hatta said, producers aimed to interview women more often during “that time of the month,” the New York Post noted.

Hatta said producers also pushed women when it was clear they were starting to fall in love, encouraging them to get even more emotional.

“If a girl’s feeling the butterflies for a guy already, when she gets into that state, her feelings just become more powerful, so she’s probably more willing to tell that guy she loves him. And maybe one of the producers knew she was in that emotional state and was like, ‘You know what? Now’s a better time than ever. You should do it, you should do it, you should do it!'”

This is not the first time that The Bachelor has been accused of manipulating the results on the show. Producers have long been accused of inserting contestants in order to bring greater drama rather than create a lasting love connection, and a handful of contestants have been identified as having significant others outside the house when they started the show.

Other insiders have also shared some behind-the-scenes details showing that The Bachelor is not as real as producers make it seem. Another former producer, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, said she would even go so far as to lie to contestants to give them a false sense of security before being eliminated from the show, drawing a more emotional response.

“The night they were going to get dumped, I would go to the hotel room where they were staying and say, ‘I’m going to lose my job for telling you this, but he’s going to pick you—he’s going to propose,'” Sarah told the New Yorker on the tactics used to get the women to cry on screen. “They’d often tell us to drive up and down the 405 until the girls cried—and not to come home if we didn’t get tears, because we’d be fired.”

This year brought its own drama, with contestant Arie Luyendyk Jr. having some last-minute changes of heart. Some fans believed the ending seemed a bit contrived, but there is no evidence yet to support that.

Retweeted The Morning Show (@morningshowto):

Who did #TheBachelor's Arie Luyendyk Jr. end up with?… https://t.co/uoWZUuI0oi

— 3.M.O.H (@avery_day) March 6, 2018

Although there may be some manipulation on The Bachelor to create more emotional moments, the outcome is often very real. There have been a handful of couples to stay together, including some marriages, so not all of it is fake.