Bachelorette Andi Dorfman spills the beans on her troubled relationship with ex-fiancé, Josh Murray, in a new tell-all book It’s Not Ok Turning Heartbreak into Happily Ever After.
The former district attorney went looking for love in the 2014 edition of The Bachelorette after her overnight date with Juan Pablo on The Bachelor earlier that year went awry.
If even some of the stories she tells are true, the relationship was pretty toxic. But then, they got engaged after 8 weeks on a reality show. It’s an outcome that’s not wholly unexpected.
Here are the highlights:
Telling US Weekly she was “100 percent sure” she’d spend her life with him when they got engaged on the show, she details how their relationship crumbled when they returned to Atlanta. Josh could be jealous and emotionally abusive. Sometimes during fights, he would call her a b**** or a w****.
The partnership was, she writes, “the most volatile and f***** up relationship of my life.”
During an overnight date while taping The Bachelorette, Andi had been intimate with runner-up (and future Bachelor) Nick Viall. Andi, afraid to tell Josh the truth, panicked when he told her at the one month anniversary of their engagement they’d be “over” if she had slept with him. She lied at first, but came clean before the episode aired.
He was devastated, angry and hurt, badly. I apologized profusely for lying. He seemed to struggle over whether he was more upset by the fact that I had lied or that I’d had sex with another man. Several more apologies later, it became clear the issue was about my having sex with someone else. That one sexual escapade would become a power play used by my fiancé to justify his mistrust in me. It would be an excuse to call me a w****. And it would eventually lead to the demise of my engagement.
Andi claims that Nick called her desire to want to go back to work “selfish” and he was jealous of her friendships with men. One night in September, at a NYC hotel, things got so ugly that she handed nick back her engagement ring. But she couldn’t quite quit him.
Alone in a random church, I cradled my head in my hands and began to sob. For the first time, I thought, I don’t think we’re going to make it. But the thought scared me — if I wasn’t the happy fiancée, who was I? Back then, I wasn’t ready to answer that question. With little time to spare, I pulled myself together and dashed back. It wasn’t until [our plane took off] that he leaned into me and whispered in my ear that he was sorry. I looked at him only to find tears rolling down his face. I had never seen him cry. Without hesitation, I wrapped my arms around him and began crying as well. It had been one of the worst fights we’d ever had, but I wasn’t ready to lose him.
Josh has responded as one might expect: “It saddens me and is very unfortunate that Andi has chosen to characterize me in such a negative way. I pray she finds peace.” The book will be out on May 17.
