Is Colton Underwood gay? 'The Bachelor' star says he came out after being 'blackmailed' with NUDE gay spa pics
Colton Underwood, from 'The Bachelor', said he "hooked up" with men before going on reality TV and was "blackmailed" into coming out. After somebody "threatened" to release X-rated pictures taken without his permission, the TV personality admitted that he made the personal announcement weeks after publicly coming out as gay.
Colton, 29, revealed in an in-depth interview with Variety that his coming out story was inspired by an outside figure. “I’ll just say it. I, at one point, during my rock bottom and spiral, was getting blackmailed. Nobody knows I was blackmailed," he confessed. Here's what you need to know.
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Is Colton Underwood gay?
On April 14, Underwood publicly came out as gay in an interview with Robin Roberts on 'Good Morning America'. "I've ran from myself for a long time. I've hated myself for a long time," Underwood told Roberts in a pre-taped chat. "And I'm gay. And I came to terms with that earlier this year and have been processing it. And the next step in all of this was sort of letting people know," he said in the interview.
"I'm still nervous, but yeah," he added. "It's been a journey for sure." After 2020, Underwood said he finally got to a point where he could be honest with himself. He said the year made people "look at themselves in the mirror and figure out who they are and what they've been running from or what they've been putting off in their lives."
"I've thought a lot about this too, of, 'Do I regret being the Bachelor and do I regret handling it the way that I did?' I do," he said. "I do think I could've handled it better, I'll say that."
He clarified that he secretly visited a spa that caters to gay clients last year, and after receiving an anonymous email claiming to have taken nude photos of him at the venue and threatening to "out" him, he told his rep.
Dated women, 'experimented' with men
Colton Underwood has been in relationships with women. He dated gymnast Aly Raisman from 2016 to 2017, after he asked her out in a video. After meeting in Season 23 of 'The Bachelor', he started dating speech pathology student Cassie Randolph. Underwood split up with the other two women and begged Randolph for a second chance without the burden of an engagement when Randolph ended their relationship during the final three. From November 2018 to May 2020, Underwood and Randolph were together.
Besides, the TV personality has spoken out about his decision to stay a virgin, as well as how being on 'The Bachelorette' aided him in doing so. "I’ll say this. I was ‘the Virgin Bachelor,’ but I did experiment with men prior to being on The Bachelorette," the former football player revealed. "When I say ‘hookups,’ not sex. I want to make that very clear that I did not have sex with a man, prior to that.”
'Straight fantasy'
In a new interview with Variety, the NFL alum discussed the uproar that followed his coming out, with some accusing him of exploiting his sexuality to hide the seriousness of the accusations made against him by Randolph, The US Magazine reported.
In September 2020, Randolph filed a restraining order against Underwood whom she said had been stalking and bullying her with disturbing text messages, according to court documents obtained by TMZ. Underwood allegedly went so far as to tape a tracking device to the bottom of her car's back bumper to keep track of her whereabouts, according to her, and showing up uninvited to her LA apartment and parent's house in Huntington Beach. She said Underwood had sent her and himself anonymous text messages, claiming to be a victim of the anonymous stalker. Underwood allegedly confessed to sending the messages and planting the tracking device.
"I never want people to think that I’m coming out to change the narrative, or to brush over and not take responsibility for my actions, and now that I have this gay life that I don’t have to address my past as a straight man,” the reality star said in Variety's cover story published on Wednesday, May 12. “That was never my intention. Controlling situations to try to grasp at any part of the straight fantasy that I was trying to live out was so wrong.”