Golden Bachelor star Theresa Nist is clapping back at her ex Gerry Turner and his newly released memoir, Golden Years: What I’ve Learned From Love, Loss, and Reality TV.
As the title suggests, the book details Turner’s tale of a heartbroken widower who became an unlikely senior-citizen TV star on the first season of the reality show, which ended with an engagement to Nist. In the memoir, Turner also devotes many pages to his ill-fated marriage to Nist and reveals his side of what went wrong between the couple.
Speaking in a new interview on the Dear Shandy podcast, Nist slammed the memoir as “a book that recounts stories about us where not one of the stories that I have read is the way it happened, and some of it is conjured up in [Turner’s] mind.”
After providing a few examples, Nist added that she’s been “so stressed about this, and I feel like I don’t have high blood pressure, but I feel like I must have high blood pressure now.”
Their televised wedding in January 2024 was watched by millions on ABC, but just three months later they announced their divorce. “Theresa and I have had a number of heart-to-heart conversations, and we’ve looked closely at our situation, our living situation, so forth, and we’ve kind of come to the conclusion mutually that it’s probably time for us to dissolve our marriage,” Turner told Good Morning America at the time, later responding, “Yes” when host Juju Chang clarified if he meant divorce.
When asked what she would say to her ex after reading the claims in his book, Nist said, bluntly, “You did me no favors by marrying a woman that you did not want to marry. You should have called off the wedding. No matter that we were on TV, that didn’t matter. This was our lives. You should have stopped it.”
In fact, she went so far as suggesting that if Turner had been open about his lingering feelings for runner-up Leslie Fhima, she would have supported it. “If you really wanted to be with Leslie, I would have applauded it,” she said. “I would have supported you. I would have been so happy.”
Nist also claimed she hadn’t been planning on airing things out publicly, but she felt forced into doing so thanks to Turner’s comments. “Gerry got me to the point where I finally had to say something and when I never planned on saying anything,” she said. “And it’s sad. I didn’t want to be in this position. I didn’t want to be saying any of these things, and I just felt forced. I felt forced to do it.”
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When asked if she feels better after telling her side of things on the podcast, Nist said she did, and the experience was “cathartic.”
Turner and Nist finalized their split in June 2024. Just last month, Turner revealed on social media that he was engaged to Lana Sutton, a retired teacher whom the reality TV star met on Facebook.
