Every season of The Bachelorette has at least one suitor who claims he wasn’t accurately portrayed on the show. This time, one man’s family has vehemently spoken out for him, causing the Bachelorette herself, Jenn Tran, to respond.
This kind of defensive commentary is usually reserved for the “Men Tell All” episode, making this fresh drama a bit of a mid-season surprise. The man in question, Sam McKinney, went on a one-on-one date with Jenn that involved jumping off a building. Even though Jenn is afraid of heights, she managed to skydive on a previous episode, but what unfolded on this particular date wasn’t just more terrifying for her ⏤ it was cringeworthy to watch.
Jenn told Sam twice that she didn’t want to jump, but he insisted that she would regret it if she didn’t. After some back-and-forth that resulted in Jenn telling the camera she didn’t think Sam was being considerate of her feelings, she reluctantly allowed herself to be strapped to a harness. After endlessly encouraging her to jump, resulting in Jenn having a near-emotional breakdown, Sam ultimately told her that she didn’t have to jump if she didn’t want to.
To the frustration of many viewers, the jump instructor then tried one last time to get Jenn to change her mind. Though Jenn was clearly uninterested, the pressure ultimately caused her to agree to go through with it. She and Sam then took a leap of faith and jumped. While there was celebration afterward, it was ultimately a date that McKinney took heat for on social media. This followed the heat he’d already received for his treatment of the other men on the show. He told fellow suitor Devin, for example, that he doesn’t respect him and later told the cameras that he could snap Devin in half if he wanted to.
After his one-on-one date episode aired, Sam’s family posted on Instagram to speak out against how The Bachelorette had portrayed him. They later deleted some of their posts, many of which claimed that Sam had been wrongly portrayed in almost every portion of the show he’d appeared in. Sam, of course, strongly agreed, and long before season’s end and that fateful “Men Tell All,” Jenn hopped onto the Love To See It podcast with Emma Grey and Claire Fallon to discuss the drama.
When asked about the one-on-one date with Sam, Jenn said, “I was definitely annoyed in the moment when he made the decision for both of us to jump and didn’t ask me and didn’t read my fears in the moment.” After expressing that she understood why Sam wanted her to jump, she added, “I don’t want a partner that’s just gonna tell me to do something and not emotionally support me in that way.” When the interviewers asked her what she thought of Sam’s family’s claims, she answered, “Nobody can put words in your mouth, and as much as a TV edit is like, no one can give you a villain edit in some way.”
We have yet to find out if Sam does become the primary villain of Jenn’s season. Some would have argued early on ⏤ and may still believe ⏤ that Devin is the proverbial thorn in the men’s collective side, but this mid-season aggravation from Sam’s family makes one wonder: is there more Sam drama on the way? Perhaps Jenn has left us a few clues in the rest of her Love To See It interview.
“You have to own your words,” she concluded. “No one is putting words in your mouth. You are the person that is saying those things. Sometimes you just gotta take responsibility for the things that are coming out of your mouth.”