During a new interview, Ben Higgins acknowledged that Theresa Nist was “upset” with him for spreading a rumor regarding her divorce from Gerry Turner.
“On the podcast, we had heard, or I had heard — I guess I should take the blame here – that one of the big factors to the two of you then deciding to get a divorce was a couple of things,” Ben, 35, told Theresa, 71, during the Tuesday, November 5, episode of the “Almost Famous” podcast, explaining that he heard that Theresa and Gerry “didn’t see eye to eye on geographic location” since Theresa lives in New Jersey and Gerry has a house in Ben’s home state of Indiana. (Theresa and Gerry got divorced three months after their televised January wedding, crediting distance as a big reason for their split.)
“The rumors were that there was a big argument about Indiana, the place that I’m from, that there’s a lot of farmland in Indiana,” Ben continued. “There is a lot of places of open space in Indiana. There ain’t a lot going on in Indiana. And we all know that.”
Theresa chimed in to tell Ben and his “Almost Famous” cohost Ashley Iaconetti that she wanted to share “exactly what happened.” However, Ben felt like he had to apologize first.
“I wanted to be clear and say that you got upset with me and that the intention was to never try to throw you under the bus,” he said. “The intention was never to do that because that’s not what we would want to do to you here.”
During a May episode of the podcast, Ben repeated a rumor that he heard that Theresa said the open Indiana land should be “developed,” and Gerry disagreed.
Theresa said the conversation did happen, but it was not as extensive as Ben made it out to seem. (Ben also encouraged Theresa to listen to the entire May podcast episode for full context.)
“We’re driving from the airport and it was like three hours and we’re getting closer to Gerry’s house,” Theresa recalled. “I see this open land. I don’t see crops. I just think it’s flat land. And I go, ‘Oh, wow, you could build townhomes there.’ That’s all I said. Gerry said, ‘Oh, so you want to take the farmer’s land away from him?’ Note to self, don’t say that again.”
Theresa shut down Ben’s rumor which was a “whole paragraph of, like, 10 sentences” that she never said.
“All I said was, ‘Oh, look at this, you could build townhomes’ and then I shut up immediately,” Theresa clarified. “That was it.”
