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As a new season of the reality TV series The Bachelor goes to air, last year’s runner-up Rochelle Emanuel-Smith tells The Weekly she felt for a year like she was the butt of the biggest joke in Australia.
“I felt the country’s biggest joke was on me,” says the 28-year-old Sydney model now, as the second season of the Network Ten series is screened. “I felt embarrassed and ashamed. Like everyone was in on the joke but me.”
Witnessed by 1.2 million people, Rochelle tells The Weekly her humiliation at being cast aside by bachelor Tim Robards, a Sydney chiropractor, for fellow contestant Anna Heinrich couldn’t have been more public – and it was all the more painful because of the ensuing storm of social media taunts she endured for months afterwards.
She says she was trolled on social media for months afterwards and told that she was ugly, looked and spoke like a man, and “needed a psychiatrist instead of a chiropractor”.
And lest anyone still thinks the scenarios presented each week on The Bachelor are real, Rochelle wishes to set the record straight.
“You are in lockdown the whole time,” she tells The Weekly. “You become desperate for affection because what you’re going through is extremely challenging. You’re on a film set every day, competing, constantly wondering whether you’re good enough. You need a real friend to talk to, but that’s taken from you.”
During the 10 weeks of filming, she says she only had two monitored conversations with her family. She said the contestants exist in a hotbed of bitchiness, competition and uncertainty. According to Rochelle, she felt “thrown around like a rag doll”.
“I never felt like the person I was was enough,” she says. “I always needed to be ‘worked on’.”
Runner-up Rochelle, winner Anna and Ali, who came third in The Bachelor season one. Photo: Instagram
In response, she says she became needy and strung-out, trying to be what she thought she should be. In reality, though, she says she thinks Tim’s mind was probably already made up – and she was being dragged along for the reality ride.
“The way the show works, it always makes you feel like you can change [how he feels] – go over there and change it! It’s really sad how I started to believe that,” she says. “I don’t want to be in a relationship where I’m crying or stressed-out or feeling like I’m not good enough all the time.”
By the finale, she says, the crew had convinced her she was Tim’s choice. “I thought maybe they were my friends, maybe they do care about me,” she says. “You can’t blame a girl who has no friends for two-and-a-half months for having a bit of faith in the people around her. It hurt a lot.”
She says she feels nothing for him anymore, but it was confusing when she didn’t hear from Tim after the dumping, especially when he had acknowledged that they shared something special. Anna, on the other hand, has been nothing but “incredibly understanding and supportive”.
For the first eight months after the show, Rochelle says she felt the pressure to find a Tim replacement, but her housemate, Dani Sanby, who was also in The Bachelor top four, persuaded her to forget the manhunt and focus on herself. Rochelle has begun studying teaching and says she now dreams of working in an overseas orphanage.
Still, The Bachelor is hard to shake. A year on, strangers still make sympathetic noises and ask how she is. If she could do it again, Rochelle says, she’d be more relaxed and fatalistic about her chances with Tim, instead of tying herself in knots: “I wish I could say, ‘If he wants me, he wants me.'”
Last month, Rochelle and Dani – and another first season contestant Sherri Mathieson, who’s staying with them – watched the current series premiere together. “It made me feel a bit queasy,” says Rochelle, especially as the contestants scrambled for attention at the opening cocktail party. “The person I am now I much prefer to the one who went in there. I have learnt a lot – how to be strong and stand tall.”
As for dating, “I don’t want a bar of it,” she says. “If I see a hot guy in the street I don’t even look at him anymore. It’s incredibly liberating. I might be single at 35, but who cares? I have found happiness in my family and friends and work, and that’s all I need now.”
If she seems to be protesting a tad too much, Rochelle does admit her Bachelor experience has made her less trusting. “I’m not seeking happiness in a man anymore,” she says, “because I don’t feel as confident that I’ll find it there.”
Rochelle insists she doesn’t want to be associated with the show anymore – so it’s curious that she’s so keen to talk about it. Her message, she explains, is one of female empowerment. Rochelle has come to the overdue conclusion that a woman doesn’t need to be validated by a man, that satisfaction can sneak up on you when you’re busy making your own plans.
“You can be your own hero – you don’t have to latch onto somebody else,” says Rochelle. “The people who matter in life are the ones who are always there for you – not some guy in a suit who’s dating all your housemates.”
