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Bachelor and Bachelorette host Chris Harrison spoke with the media recently about Bentley, the worst villain in The Bachelorette history, and explained how Bentley’s actions and intentions almost shut down show production and broke Ashley Hebert’s heart.

Here are some excerpts from Chris Harrison interview:

On when Harrison figured out Bentley had bad intentions:
“I thought he was going to be trouble the moment Ashley told me he was going to be trouble. [Ashley and I] talked …I was pretty adamant about my feelings towards him. I usually try to walk that fine gray line of host-friend-confidant, but when you have information before the guy even gets out of the limo, that is beyond a red flag … She was so anti everything she had done on Brad’s season, the being closed off … this season she kind of threw caution to the wind and did the opposite. We actually gave her the option before the limo pulled up: You don’t have to meet this guy. She said, ‘No, I want to meet him. if I don’t like this guy, I’ll kick him off.’ She made the decision to go forward.”

On how hard it was for Harrison to watch the madness on the sideline:
“Really hard. She’s a friend of mine. But it gets to the point, and this is one of the things I find fascinating about this show, where I’m no longer a host, I’m a friend and I’m about to watch someone have their heart broken. Now all I can do is stand by and watch it and be there for her when it happens. You just have to be there for them …You’ll see in the deliberation Monday night, it was very much not a deliberation. This was a friend walking in to pick up the pieces of another friend who had just had her heart ripped apart.”

On why Ashley kept Bentley around for so many weeks:
“I’d be interested to talk to her now and get her perspective now that she’s had some time to heal and look into it more. Was it the bad boy? Was it, ‘I wanna fix him?’ The mother syndrome? Maybe it was a little bit of all of that. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but I found it very perplexing myself. But he was so smooth, so caring around her, she never got to see his true colors and eventually he was able to use that and crush her.”

On Bentley’s “tickle my [bleep]” comment:
“I think you’ve gotta see what the guy said. If it upsets someone’s sensibilities or if it went too far, as far as any of our fans are concerned, I do apologize for that. But this is what this guy was saying. This was what he thought of Ashley. I think in true context you need to see what this guy was about and what his game was. Ashley didn’t get to see or hear a lot of that … you really had to show both sides to show exactly just how bad it was and how badly she’s going to have the rug ripped out from under her on Monday night.”

On whether Bentley’s comments have been edited:“You can’t splice together when you see somebody like that. And honestly, you can’t really take the things he said out of context. Even in joking they’re not appropriate. You don’t talk about a woman like that. I would love to hear what his friends have to say about the stunt he pulls when he’s leaving, because I think that is worse than anything he says before.”

On whether they would have eventually shown Ashley some of this footage:
“Maybe if this had gone any further, you have to understand too, we’re only two weeks in this, things had just started getting out of hand and him saying all these things. If it had gone on longer, I don’t know the steps we would’ve taken, if we would’ve finally shown her these things. She was privy to a lot of information and lot of what we thought. Some of the producers had told her this guy’s not good for you and I had told her some things. She had so much more information, more than Ali or Jillian ever had about Justin or Wes.”

On how Bentley got cast in the first place:
“He obviously didn’t say all those derogatory things in casting. He obviously didn’t say, ‘If it’s Ashley, I’m going to use her and destroy her.’ We are casting all the time, even while we’re shooting. I don’t get involved in the casting for many reasons, but I never saw any of his stuff, I really didn’t.”

On the aftermath:
“We didn’t put this guy in there to draw up this drama. This really doesn’t turn out to be a good thing for Ashley or us. It got to the point where we almost shut down production. We didn’t know if she could continue on. This really makes her question everything: the rest of the guys, herself, if this is gonna work, if it’s worth it.”

On Bentley having a daughter and his possible appearance on “Men Tell All” special:
“I have a son and I have a daughter and I can’t fathom treating a woman like that anyway, but much less someone who has a daughter. I really hope he comes back to the ‘Men Tell All,’ not so I can rip him apart, but so I can hear his explanation. Can you imagine a man treating your daughter that way? I’d love to hear his response. I don’t know what his end game was or what his motivations were. Things he said and things he did really crossed the line of decency, as far as I’m concerned.”

On what Ashley thinks of Bentley now:
“She called me last week and said, ‘I can’t believe all these things. I feel like such a fool and so played.’ Again, this is hindsight. She’s seeing him for who he really is. It’s funny, she said, ‘Why didn’t you say something?’ ‘Ashley, I did.’ And she’d say, ‘I know.’ That’s the way it works. When you’re friends with someone, that’s all you can do. Let them fall on their face, then give them a big hug, pick them up and move on.”

Chris Harrison and me 🙂