Despite everything that went down between Zach Shallcross and Gabi Elnicki during the finale of The Bachelor, Kaity Biggar is confident she will stay friends with the season 27 runner-up.
“We’ve already had trips together. We’ve been to Florida. A lot of the girls came to Austin for the premiere and, me, Gabi, Ariel [Frenkel], Jess [Girod] and Mercedes [Northup] were actually gonna Miami at the end of April. We’re all very tight,” Kaity, 28, said on Us Weekly’s “Here for the Right Reasons” podcast during an interview with Zach, 26, on Tuesday, March 28.
During Monday’s finale, Gabi, 25, arrived for the final rose ceremony confident that Zach was going to pick Kaity. After she got to the location in Thailand and stepped in mud upon leaving the car, she declared: “When it actually matters, when Kaity arrives, don’t do that to her.”
Kaity told Us that her BFF clued her in on the remark at the time.
“Gabi has a heart of gold. She actually told me that right after we finished filming. She’s like, ‘Oh my God, Kaity, I don’t know if they’re gonna air this, but this is what I did.’ And we were just howling about it,” Kaity told Us. “We both have each other’s back throughout the whole season. We confided in each other. And I think even in that final episode, you see how much I thought of her as a woman. I even told Zach, I was like, ‘She’s an incredible woman. You have a tough decision to make.’ Honestly [I got] such amazing friendships out of the season I’m so grateful for.”
Zach did indeed propose to Kaity after officially ending things with Gabi. The exes had an emotional reunion at After the Final Rose as Gabi confronted Zach about telling Kaity — and “the whole nation” — that they had sex during their overnight date.
“In that moment, I told her, I was like, ‘OK, yes, this can be a secret.’ And the guilt ate at me,” Zach told Us. “And thinking that there’s an engagement right around the corner and I’m holding in a secret, like, I don’t know, that is the scariest thing. That’s not who I am as a man. That’s not what I want to be — to hold secrets and not give the full truth. Obviously, it caused a lot of pain though, and I don’t take away from that. There’s several ways it could have gone different, and I hope Gabi knows that, like, the intentions were as pure as they could be, and I did not wanna hurt her on that.”
Kaity, for her part, said it was tough to watch back but knows her fiancé was doing his best when he made the initial rule not to have sex on the show.
“I wasn’t in his shoes at all. I think he has such an amazing heart and he just didn’t wanna muddy the waters, but obviously, in turn, it did happen,” she said. “But I think, like, going in [to] fantasy suite week, I just wanted to use that time — that intimate time — to just get to know each other more on a more emotional level and just see what we’re like off the cameras too. I was just looking forward to that. And, obviously, I was really excited for our day date and the kayak and whatnot, and, obviously, that turned a little sour pretty quick. But, in Bachelor world, things don’t always go as planned, so I don’t think I really went in with a whole lot of expectations. I was just hoping it would go smoothly and we hit a hurdle for sure. But in the end, we came out stronger.”
For more from Zach and Kaity, watch the video above and listen to Us Weekly’s “Here for the Right Reasons” podcast.
