Shawn Booth is getting candid about his split from Kaitlyn Bristowe — while also admitting that he doesn’t love when the former Bachelorette opens up about their past.
“When we had broken up, the last time I saw her, I was like, ‘I do not want to talk to you or see you ever again,’” the 36-year-old trainer said on his “In the Booth With Shawn Booth” podcast on Tuesday, June 27. “I said that out of, like, the situation that happened, and how I found out everything and that’s where it was kind of left off. So I did not really have any communication with her for years.”
Booth and Bristowe, 38, announced their split in November 2018, three years after he proposed on season 11 of The Bachelorette.
“When [the split] was about to be released to the world, my whole thing was, and I said this … ‘I want to make sure we do this together as a team. … It’s going to be really hard on both of us. We’re gonna have to deal with all different types of opinions and thoughts and people judging us. It’s, like, me and you are the only people that are going through this. Let’s do it as a team,’” he explained. “And it didn’t work out that way. … We weren’t a team.”
Booth admitted that the way the Dancing With the Stars champ moved on with Jason Tartick — whom she went public with in January 2019 — was the issue.
“The reason why I had said that, ‘Hey, I don’t want to talk anymore. I don’t want to see you,’ [is] because when we were going through this together, I knew about Jason and Kaitlyn before anybody knew about Jason and Kaitlyn,” Booth said. “I’ve known about this before the world knew about it. And I knew about it, because, unfortunately, when I was sending Kaitlyn a text message, she sent me one back that she was supposed to send to Jason.”
He claimed the text mixup was “right after” the twosome had officially called it quits.
“I’ll never forget because I was in West Elm. And I was looking for furniture for my apartment because I literally had nothing in my apartment. I told her she could keep the house, I’ll move out, like, whatever. I didn’t want to be there,” Booth recalled. “So I’m just looking for furniture. … It was rough. I mean, and the worst thing was you couldn’t talk about it — I didn’t want to blow up her spot.”
While Bristowe and Tartick, who got engaged in 2021, are still going strong, the Bachelor alum is often asked about Booth in various interviews — something he recently tried to put a stop to.
“This is just, like, kind of me contradicting myself of talking to her because I asked her kindly to stop talking about me on her podcast because I said it’s not fun getting [media outreach] every few months,” Booth said on Tuesday, adding that he “ignore[s]” comment calls.
While Booth said he didn’t want to “talk negatively” about his ex, he continued: “I just didn’t think what she was saying was accurate. I think she was saying things that were incorrect.”
He added: “I know what happened. I know how everything went down. She can say what she wants to say — if that’s something that makes her feel better or something that she has to discuss. And, you know, she’s an open book. And she told me that, which I understand. And, sometimes, it’s good to talk about, like, it’s good talking about right now because I never talked about it! And I don’t want to sit here talking negatively about my ex who I spent time with.”
Most recently, Bristowe made headlines for implying she felt “used professionally” by Booth, suggesting he “was hanging” onto the relationship “until his gym opened.”
“This is all just from my point of view and from how I felt and things that I saw,” she said on Tartick’s “Trading Secrets” podcast in April. “It doesn’t mean they’re right or wrong, but would you or would you not agree that when couples come off the show — whether it was a Bachelor and the woman he picked or Bachelorette and the guy she picked — that that is a really hard foundation to start on and a power struggle? … All of these opportunities, they’re like, ‘We want Kaitlyn there and well, Shawn can come too,’ or ‘Maybe not. Maybe it’s just Kaitlyn or it’s the two of us together.’ But like it was always if I was there, then he was invited.”
She continued: “And I think that on top of already feeling emasculated on the show where you’re not the one and there’s other relationships building and you thought it was you the whole time and then you realize it wasn’t — how does the relationship even work after that? I don’t know. It’s hard.”
Two months earlier, Bristowe revealed on the “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast that Tartick and Booth had recently been on the same plane but didn’t talk to each other. Booth noted on Tuesday that he’s seen Tartick several times since, including at CMA Fest in Nashville earlier this month.
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“I feel like I see him everywhere in Nashville, which is just become a normal thing,” he said, confirming that they don’t speak. “It’s not weird. There’s no animosity, no hard feelings.”
