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The Bachelorette star Jenn Tran called out her ex Devin Strader for his social media activity after he ended their engagement.
Tran and Strader addressed the downfall of their relationship during the season 21 finale of The Bachelorette, which aired on September 3. Their confrontation took place during the “After the Final Rose” special, two months after Tran proposed to Strader in Hawaii, where she bent down on one knee and gave him a ring.
Before the proposal was shown, Tran sat down with host Jesse Palmer and revealed that Strader had ended their engagement over phone call. She was later joined by Strader, leading to the emotional conversation where Tran called him out for following a beloved member of Bachelor Nation, Maria Georgas - who was her former castmate on Joey Graziadei’s season of The Bachelor - on social media
“What I can’t understand is everything that you did after we’ve broken our engagement,” she said. “Ending the engagement on a phone call, and the next day, I wake up to you following girls on Instagram — not just any girl, but Maria. Not only is that so disrespectful to everything that we had shared together, I just don’t understand it. Why would you do something like that?”
Tran continued: “Because it completely invalidated our entire relationship, everything that I had felt for you, everything that we’d felt for each other. Did that even mean anything to you?”
While Strader expressed that it was “hard to put into words” how he was feeling, Tran cut him off and responded: “It was so hard that you followed Maria on Instagram?”
Strader then confessed that he couldn’t “excuse the Instagram follow,” so Tran asked him if he did this “to be cruel.” While he said he didn’t follow Georgas – who denied the opportunity to be The Bachelorette herself – to be mean to Tran, he still acknowledged how he hurt her in the relationship.
“Obviously I failed you,” he said. “And there’s nothing I can say other than that. But, everything I felt for you was real.”
Tran continued to call Strader out for his behavior after the breakup, revealing that she saw how he went clubbing with one of his former castmates on the show, Jeremy Simon.
“Because you said, ‘Oh I was having such a hard time with this breakup,’” she recalled to him. “Next thing I know, you’re in New York clubbing with Jeremy. You said, ‘Oh I need time and space to process my emotions. This makes me sad.’”
However, Strader clarified that he went to New York for a work trip, before hitting back with: “Am I not allowed to live a life?”
Later in the episode, the pair watched their initial proposal in Hawaii, which Tran said she thought was “the happiest day” of her life. She then acknowledged that she was proud of the woman she was during the show and that proposal.
“I do not regret proposing to the man on there, but what happened was, that man doesn’t exist anymore. And the truth of the matter is, I’m still that same woman I am. The woman that stood there was ready to fight for love, was ready to give everything to a person, was ready to start a family,” she said. “At this point, I do know what I deserve, and I know that that man, somebody else will be that man for me. I can find that person who will fulfill all the promises he made me, instead of leaving me with nothing.”
When Palmer gave Tran the “last word” during the special, she shared what she hoped her ex learned from their relationship and breakup.
“I hope that you learn that the weight of your words matter, and that if you’re going to promise something, you should be able to fulfill those promises,” she said. “I simply couldn’t have done what you have done in that position. And when I love something, I nurture it and I value it, and I don’t throw it away the next day.”
Before Strader joined Tran on stage during the “After the Final Rose” special, she revealed how the relationship changed when the show ended.
“It’s been a really hard couple of months. We had left Hawaii engaged, very very happy,” she said. “As soon as we had left Hawaii, things were just different. It kind of felt like he was pulling away, all the promises he had made to me of wanting to move somewhere together and have this future planned out. The efforts were inconsistent. He wasn’t calling as much, texting as much. I was confused.”
She also shared more details about their phone call, during which he ended their relationship.
“He had basically said that he didn’t love me anymore and didn’t feel the same way and felt like something had been off," she said. "He regretted getting engaged and I didn’t know,” she added.
