Golden Bachelor star Gerry Turner has made some claims against Theresa Nist about their three-month marriage that ended in divorce. His new novel, Golden Years: What I’ve Learned From Love, Loss, and Reality TV, has Nist fighting back, stating the stories he told didn’t happen that way.
Nist had won Gerry’s final rose on the Golden Bachelor, with the two getting married on live TV. They announced their divorce three months later, claiming their inability to decide on where to live and Gerry’s cancer diagnosis as part of the reasoning.
Tuner’s new book makes further allegations about what ended their relationship, but Nist has refused to let him have the final word.
“You did me no favors by marrying a woman that you did not want to marry,” she said on the Dear Shandy podcast.
“You should not. 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 the book, Turner also wrote about his struggles to choose between Nist and runner-up Leslie Fhima. Nist, in return, revealed that she would have applauded the couple if Turner had chosen Fhima.
“If you really wanted to be with Leslie, I would have applauded it,” she revealed. “I would have supported you. I would have been so happy.”
One of the biggest allegations that has gotten attention was Turner claiming Nist asked him to sleep on the couch the first night they were together in her New Jersey home. Nist called out her ex, saying they had slept together the first night, but truthfully told him she didn’t get a good night’s sleep on her full-size bed.
She adds that Turner was the one who had offered to sleep on the couch the following day, and ordered a bigger bed immediately as part of her primary bedroom renovation for them.
The Golden Bachelor alumna further explains she had no intention to talk publicly about their marriage but felt “forced” to and couldn’t “ignore it” because of the book. She added that she didn’t want Turner’s daughters to hear “anything bad” about their father.
“It was really a matter of, if you have nothing good to say just don’t say anything. I didn’t want to hurt him. I never want to hurt another human being. I didn’t want to make anything bad for him, and I didn’t want to make it bad in case he wanted to find someone else,” she said.
