At first, Alisha Aitken-Radburn was excited to see herself as a contestant on Australia’s The Bachelor. But by the season’s midway point, it was clear she wasn’t getting the edit she’d hoped for.
Along with two of her friends in the cast, Aitken-Radburn was being painted as a “mean girl”. In the scheme of reality television villains, her behaviour was not particularly egregious – a rude remark here, a heated argument there. But the 2018 season she was featured on – with former rugby union player Nick “The Honey Badger” Cummins – reached a mammoth average national audience of 1.25 million, many of which turned against her. As each episode aired, her social media was flooded with comments and messages calling her a “dog”, a “turd”, a “bully” and a “putrid rat”. It was relentless, and felt, she recalls, like an “existential crisis”.
“I had a picture of who I was as a person in my mind,” Aitken-Radburn says. “I didn’t think that I was an angel, but I didn’t think that I was the absolutely horrible person that people in my Instagram DMs were telling me that I was.”
Five years on from that public flaying, Aitken-Radburn is reflecting on reality TV in a new memoir, The Villain Edit – named for the portrayal she received on that juggernaut franchise.
A former political staffer, Aitken-Radburn is warm in our interview, but has a politician’s knack for answering the question she wanted to be asked, rather than the one she was asked. Her book doesn’t present her as a hapless victim: she admits to her own mistakes on set, and ruthlessly examines the aspects of her personality that drew her to the genre in the first place – and saw her return for two seasons of the spin-off show Bachelor in Paradise. It’s a nuanced look at what goes on behind the scenes of reality television, one which balances the good with the bad.
Other former reality TV contestants have spoken out against the way they were manoeuvred by producers – but “the manipulation was soft” for Aitken-Radburn: “I can identify … the levers that were being pulled.”
During filming, she had realised she wasn’t being considered a real romantic option for Cummins: she spoke to him for a grand total of 15 minutes during her six weeks on the show, she says.
That’s why, to “try and buy myself more episodes”, she offered up quips about castmates and their appearances in her confessional interviews. “I wanted to do a good job for the producer. I’d say something spicy and I would get a laugh from the producer. And that laugh was just kryptonite to me.”
Initially, those remarks made her the season’s “funny narrator”. But the line between funny narrator and villain is easy to trip over. “It wasn’t all the edit. There were definitely things that we said in interviews that we thought were edgy and funny. And they just weren’t – they were mean.”
Aitken-Radburn’s reality TV stint was complicated by her career. She was 25 and working as an advancer for the Labor party in then opposition leader Bill Shorten’s office when, reeling from a bad breakup, she applied for The Bachelor on an impulse. Higher-ups considered the dating show a liability – political staffers are expected to stay behind the scenes – and she was forced to resign. One colleague expressed “that basically I would live to regret it”, Aitken-Radburn says. Upon her return to Canberra – now jobless, but catching up with former workmates over drinks – an unnamed female Labor MP told her she had degraded herself and should be embarrassed.
“I thought I’d completely decimated my prospects of being considered a savvy, smart political operator again,” she says.
The Villain Edit is also the story of Aitken-Radburn’s lifelong feelings of inadequacy, which she writes about with admirable honesty. In the past, it has led her to seeking validation through sexual relationships, pursuing uninterested men and going to great lengths to make her life seem perfect on Instagram.
That need for validation manifested in how she handled the aftermath of the show, too. She opted not to switch off her Instagram comments despite the abuse, and would trawl Bachelor fan forums to find out what others thought of her. She even went on a date with one of the trolls in her DMs (she sent a “flirtatious reply” to his admonishment; two weeks later they were making out outside a brewery). And she writes about feeling envious of friend and castmate Brooke Blurton, who swiftly acquired the sort of post-Bachelor media career Aitken-Radburn had wanted for herself.
“I can be a deeply insecure person,” she says. “I don’t think that that’s something that people express very often.”
Aitken-Radburn eventually found a new role in politics, working for a number of years as the director of events and fundraising for NSW Labor. She juggled her political career with a further two seasons of Bachelor in Paradise – “different people within the party have different appetites for risk,” she says – and fared much better on the spin-off, scoring a flattering “redemption arc”.
She also met her husband on the show, Glenn Smith – the pair becoming one of the rare couples to actually find love on reality TV. Today they live in Perth, where Aitken-Radburn, now 30, works in government relations at a community services organisation (with a side hustle as an Instagram influencer).
So on balance, was her former colleague right – did she live to regret her decision to go on reality TV?
“I definitely don’t,” Aitken-Radburn says. “I look at where I’ve landed, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
The Villain Edit by Alisha Aitken-Radburn is out now through Allen and Unwin
