UPDATE: The fallout in Bachelor Nation surrounding the Blake/Caelynn/Kristina drama has continued throughout this week, and last night Caelynn finally spoke out about what’s been going on. After Blake posted and deleted their texts on Tuesday night, Caelynn responded on Wednesday with a lengthy statement on her Instagram.
First, Caelynn immediately owned up to sending those texts, but said that the screenshots from Stagecoach are not an accurate representation of their relationship. She also said that she’s “mortified” that her private texts were published by someone she considered a friend. I actually feel for her on this. In this era of social media scandals and receipts, it’s become super common for people to publish text screenshots, but it’s definitely still an invasion of privacy.
Caelynn also says that it seems like she and Blake just had different ideas of what their relationship was. She clarifies that when she said Blake “ghosted” her, she was referring to before Stagecoach, after they had been talking for a few months. This makes more sense, given that they were definitely texting between Stagecoach and the time they left for Paradise.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B04owj7H8VI/
While Caelynn does an okay job of trying to move past the drama, I do think she did an important thing by addressing the comments people have made about her. As someone who has been open about her history with sexual assault, she is adamant that she will live her life how she wants to, whether people approve or not.
Unsurprisingly, the person who came out of this with the best take was none other than Bekah Martinez:
https://twitter.com/whats_ur_sign_/status/1159273926880419840
Yeah, basically Blake and Caelynn both did some messed up sh*t, which is not that surprising, and maybe they really do belong together. This season of Bachelor in Paradise is already iconic, so I can’t wait to see how the rest of this mess unfolds.
I’m usually not a big Bachelor watcher, but damn, Paradise is already bringing the heat this year. Obviously, you can read our full recaps for all of the drama that’s going down with Chris Harrison’s messy beach crew, but the nightmare that’s unfolded between Caelynn and Blake (and Kristina, and Tayshia, etc.) is worthy of its own analysis. After Tuesday night’s episode, Blake took to Instagram to share screenshots of his pre-Paradise texts with Caelynn, and it started a sh*t storm of epic proportions.
One would imagine the point of Blake sharing the texts would be to clear his name, but honestly, they just make the whole situation murkier. On the show, Caelynn is making Blake seem like the world’s biggest asshole, but the texts don’t make her look so great either. To make matters even more confusing, Blake then deleted the screenshots from his story, saying that he “never wanted Caelynn to get attacked like this.” Sorry buddy, but it’s a little too late, because we obviously have all the screenshots saved.
In the first set of three screenshots, which Blake captions “Stagecoach,” we see him and Caelynn in a back-and-forth that might be flirting, but really comes across as more creepy on Caelynn’s part. She says she’s coming over, and he protests over and over again as she tells him to “chill” and “loosen up.” She then says she ordered an Uber, which is seriously questionable to me. Like, if I told someone multiple times not to come over and they said they ordered an Uber, I would immediately take out a restraining order, and probably move out of the country.
In the second screenshot, we can see that Blake has cropped out the majority of a photo, and that really weakens his case here. When someone posts text screenshots as proof of something, there’s always a chance that they’ve added or removed things to shape the narrative, so Blake should’ve just left the entire photo so we wouldn’t be left wondering what he’s leaving out.
In the second chunk of texts, Caelynn says something weird about sleeping in the shower, and then continues to taunt Blake when he says that they can cuddle but not have sex. Even if she was joking around with him, it’s not a great look. Think about it this way: if it was a woman telling a man that she wouldn’t have sex with him, and his response was “Yes sex. Only sex,” I don’t think we’d be having a discussion about who’s right and who’s wrong.
But then, Blake flips it around and says something gross about how Caelynn acts when she starts drinking. I think he might be saying that after she drinks she’s going to want to cuddle, but it’s all very confusing at this point. I have a feeling they’d both already been drinking, and no one said these two were the smartest people in the world to begin with.
I totally understand if Caelynn just wanted to have sex with Blake (me too before this week), but these texts make her seem thirsty at best, and verging on problematic/predatory. We’ll never really know exactly what went down between all of the Paradise people at Stagecoach, but these texts don’t really do anything to clarify the situation, for better or worse. All we really know is that it was messy, which isn’t new information.
The most interesting portion of the texts, in my opinion, are the ones that Blake labels “1 week before paradise.” In these manic conversations, Blake and Caelynn are both up in arms about how to deal with their past relationship, as it pertains to Paradise. It’s unclear what was the inciting incident for these texts, but obviously something happened that really freaked both Blake and Caelynn out. It seems most likely that someone found out about their relationship from a third party, and they were afraid that their trips to Paradise would be affected if everyone found out.
I’m not really sure why they were so afraid of people finding out, because obviously messy AF ABC isn’t about to turn down the drama of two people with a contentious past. They live for this sh*t. Have you seen how they invited Clay and Angela to the beach? But perhaps there was something in their Paradise contracts about not telling anyone until they were on camera? It makes sense that production would want them to save the biggest drama for while the cameras were rolling, and if everyone on the beach already knew about Stagecoach, this week of Paradise would’ve basically just been JPJ throwing up.
The texts about Colton and Cassie start to bring things into the light a little bit more. It seems like Caelynn probably had previously told Cassie about hooking up with Blake, and so they were worried that she and/or Colton had spread the information to other people. Honestly, I totally wouldn’t put it past those two to totally narc on Caelynn, but they said they didn’t know what happened.
In that text where Blake talks about telling someone “so that she isn’t crazy mad when she is down there,” he’s probably referring to Hannah G, but more on that in a minute.
In the further texts, Caelynn and Blake are still going back and forth about what to do, I guess in terms of whether or not they should even go on the show? It seems like they both knew they didn’t want to tell anyone about their relationship, so I’m not sure what else they would be debating. On the show, Caelynn talks about how Blake said that hooking up with her was a mistake, and in these texts, he basically says just that. We might still be missing some context, but Caelynn wasn’t fully lying.
Really, it’s tough because we’ll never know what happened on that phone call, or any of the other times they talked on the phone. They were both clearly really nervous about this whole situation, but I think a lot of it actually comes back to Hannah G. In the last texts that Blake posted, Caelynn messages him to ask if he’s told her yet, presumably referring to their history.
Even though it weirdly hasn’t really been addressed on the show, everyone pretty much knew before the show that Hannah G and Blake were into each other. Caelynn did say that Hannah was one of the women Blake was DMing the morning after they hooked up at Stagecoach. Hannah and Caelynn are friends from Colton’s season, so it makes sense that Caelynn would be nervous about Hannah’s reaction to finding out. We don’t know the timeline of when Blake was talking to each of these women (probably all at the same time), but it was bound to get messy when they all found out.
We don’t even know if Blake and Caelynn ever told Hannah G before the show, but either way, things have obviously gone bad for him on the first few nights of Paradise. These texts are a lot to get through, but I think the biggest takeaway is that Caelynn has been very favorable to herself in how she’s characterized her relationship with Blake. From the texts, it seems unlikely that she really thought they were ever in an exclusive relationship, and he definitely wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to tell everyone about them.
There’s still a lot more Bachelor In Paradise to go, and I’m sure we’ll get a lot more drama between Blake and basically every woman there, but for now, he should probably refrain from posting more screenshots on Instagram. He might not be the only asshole in the situation, but that doesn’t mean he’s not still an asshole.
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Images: balockaye.h (7) / Instagram
