Melissa's betrayal by Bachelor Jason Mesnick

Melissa's betrayal by Bachelor Jason Mesnick during After the Final Rose taping

Written by: Karen Benardello


Jason Mesnick, the most recent man looking for love on ABC’s The Bachelor and who once had America’s sympathy after embarrassingly being turned down by DeAnna Pappas on last season’s The Bacherlotte, simply said he had no choice.

This simple explanation is his reasoning for publicly dumping his fiancée and Bachelor winner Melissa Rycroft in order to re-unite with runner-up Molly Malaney on Monday night’s After the Final Rose special.

Though he said he would have preferred to have broken the news to Rycroft off camera, Mesnick is insisting the producers told him he had to do the painful act on national television. “That was part of the deal. I signed up for it in my contract. Your relationship is…in front of everybody,” Mesnick told PEOPLE Magazine about the surprising turn of events.

The single Seattle father, who was famously not only looking for a wife but also for a mother for his four-year-old son, Ty, also said: “If I could have, I would have seen Melissa the night before. It killed me. It kills me now.”

In the two-hour season finale, Mesnick proposed to Rycroft immediately after ending his relationship with Malaney, for whom he cried over a balcony for in a now-infamous scene. Rycroft enthusiastically accepted, but was pushed aside by Mesnick six weeks later during the filming of After the Final Rose when he confessed he still had feelings for Malaney. When he asked Malaney for a second chance, she immediately agreed. The two kissed and cuddled during the rest of the special, as if nothing happened, further fueling Rycroft’s sense of betrayal, and causing America’s love affair with Mesnick to end.

Mesnick said he believes Bachelor viewers must think of him as a jerk. “I’m not proud of what I had to do,” he said, because he insists that soon after the cameras stopped rolling, the joy of his engagement to Rycroft began to fade. “After we got back into the real world, all of a sudden, we had less to talk about and I didn’t know why. I started thinking wow, what’s happening? Why aren’t we communicating the way we did when the show was going on?” Mesnick said, and also insists that he held off on sharing his doubts with Melissa.

“I didn’t say something right away because I wanted to figure out what was going in inside of me,” he also told PEOPLE. “There was part of me that wanted things to work out with Melissa so bad. But the whole other piece was I had these crazy feelings for Molly.” Mesnick said he finally couldn’t deny the truth any longer: “Melissa and I just have different ways of communicating. We’re not right for each other.”