Now that we're down to the final two on this season of The Bachelor, most of the on-screen drama has ended. However, in an unexpected turn of events, the show's former winner, Laura Byrne, and one of Australia's former Bachelorette's, Georgia Love, have started feuding off-screen.
Confused? Us too. It appears that Byrne, who is engaged to Matty J, took issue with Love's commentary on a recent episode of The Bachelor, which saw Matt Agnew send fan favourite Elly Miles home. At the time of the elimination, Love tweeted, “F*** YOU MATT. Don’t @ me.”
Byrne, who co-hosts a podcast, Life Uncut, with her former co-star Brittany Hockley, speaks about the tweet on a recent episode about online trolls and bullying, saying, "The fact that Georgia Love had said this really grinds my gears.”
“My issue with it didn’t so much come from, she’s offering criticism — I mean, it’s totally okay to not be an Abbie [Chatfield] fan and to be upset that your favourite character’s going home — however, language is really, really important," she explained.
“She didn’t say, 'Hey this isn’t cool'. She chose to use obscenities and basically verbally abused Matt for his choices.”
Byrne went on to say that Love's tweet "validates" others to act the same way, something which she says isn't "the example that we should be setting when we [reality TV contestants] have been in that position before."
She continued: “The thing that really struck me as being hypocritical with this one is that number five was Cam Cranley in her season … Georgia Love sent him home and didn’t bring him on to hometowns. I know that she copped a lot of flack at that point in time because she was following her heart.”
“And I just think as a journalist and someone who really understands the power of language, I expected more than that [from Georgia]."
Love, who recently got engaged to partner Lee Elliott, hasn't yet responded to Byrne's criticisms.
