‘Bachelor’ Peter Weber Dishes On The Women’s Constant Fighting

Published on February 7, 2020.

ABC

Seeing conflict on The Bachelor is nothing new to viewers, but Peter Weber’s season is considered the most dramatic of all of them.

Notable conflicts include a small group of women turning against fellow contestant Alayah Benavidez, who accused her of being “fake” and acting like a “different person” around the cameras. Weber sent her home, but changed his mind and invited her back. The women were outraged when she came back, which left the Bachelor star to eliminate her again.

After Benavidez’s exit, another feud emerged between Kelsey Weier and Tammy Ly, with Ly accusing Weier of “drinking excessively” after she had a mental breakdown. Ly also didn’t like another contestant, Mykenna Dorn, and after an endless back-and-forth between the two, Weber said goodbye to both of them in this week’s episode.

How does Weber feel about all the drama on his season that has dominated so many of his conversations?

“A lot of times it was the women bringing things up, and that would be how the conversation would start,” Weber told PEOPLE. “That was tough for me. I didn’t really want to spend my time talking about other women with who I was with at that point. But it occurred multiple times throughout this season, and I kind of had no choice but to give in and get to the bottom of what they were concerned about.”

He added, “We weren’t truly getting to know each other as well as we could have. I do wish that the conversations wouldn’t have been so focused on each other.”

When it came to asking Benavidez to come back, Weber said he “felt very pulled to her for a reason I can’t really explain.”

“I really wanted to focus on that relationship with myself and her,” he explained. “When you like someone, you feel for someone. There was obviously a lot of opinions in the house about her, and unfortunately that caused a lot of drama and a lot of controversy. It ended up ultimately being a big reason of why I had to let her go, just for the greater good of it all with the house and how toxic of an environment it became with her there. That was tough.”

Weber told the outlet that if Benavidez was “the one,” things would’ve turned out differently.

“No matter how hard it would have been, I wouldn’t have let her go if I legit thought, ‘This is my wife here,’ ” he elaborated. “But it became too much and I wasn’t that invested in her at that point. So it wasn’t worth it to take that chance and wreak all this havoc.”

The Bachelor star admitted he was also “very surprised” by how quickly issues around the girls escalated.

“There’s so much I don’t see that occurs throughout filming — I’m only there for my interactions with each of the women face-to-face,” Weber said. “But a lot of the conversations that I’ve seen now take place … there’s a lot of stuff that I just discovered by watching, like the girls attacking each other. I truly did not know that ever really occurred to that extent.”

He was also disappointed with Ly’s behavior when confronting Weier.

“Those accusations of Tammy calling [Kelsey] out for being a pill popper and drinking too much and attacking her, I didn’t support that at all,” the Bachelor star said. “I wasn’t cool with it and that was just sad for me to see.”

At the end of the day, Weber doesn’t regret the choices he’s made so far. “There were mistakes that were made, and I learned from those,” he said.

Weber added, “There was a lot of wasted time on unnecessary stuff.”

The Bachelor airs every Monday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

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