Former Bachelorette Rachel Recchia is addressing the shade she received from ex Tino Franco for taking another chance at love.
Rachel, 27, is part of the cast of the upcoming season of Bachelor in Paradise, and a first look shows her sharing a kiss with Jordan Vandergriff — a contestant she had sent home on week 2 of season 19 of The Bachelorette.
“I just don’t understand, why am I not allowed to move on?” she said on Nick Viall’s “The Viall Files” podcast episode on Tuesday, September 26, responding to Tino dissing her decision to look for The One on the beach. “And why am I not allowed to find love?”
Rachel and Tino, 29, ended season 19 happily engaged, but it did not last long. The pair split when Tino confessed to kissing someone else after the show wrapped. During the tense live After the Final Rose episode, runner-up Aven Jones showed up asking Rachel to talk, but she walked away single.
Things between Rachel and Tino have been messy since the pair called it quits. Last month, Tino claimed that Rachel tried to call him, but he ignored her outreach. Rachel denied these events.
“As far as I know, I did not reach out to him,” she told Nick. “I do think it’s interesting that a call is the only thing I guess you can’t provide like a receipt for. Because I tried to scroll back, I was like ‘Did I call him? I don’t even know, maybe I did call him, I don’t know.’ I went back and I was like ‘Oh you can’t even go back that far in your calls.’”
Rachel went on to allege that Tino had an “emotional connection” with the person he kissed while the pair were engaged — which goes against Tino’s original claim.
“There is so much more than just the physical kiss,” she claimed. “There was this emotional relationship happening and this person that it happened with was someone he was going to date after the show. It’s just hard for me to hear him continue to say ‘Oh it was just this one drunken mistake,’ because it wasn’t.”
Rachel went on to allege that Tino was “planning on seeing” this person, but he got cast on The Bachelorette. She said when he told Rachel about this, he mentioned that the pair had been “flirting a little.”
“I guess there’s just a lot to the story,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now, I really have moved forward. That’s not something I want to harp on or be like ‘He was wrong for this, this and this.’ I guess it’s just hard to know what I know and still have this coming out.”
Tino’s original comments about Rachel were made on the “After Reality” podcast last month.
“I’ll probably watch because I heard rumors that Aven and Tyler [Norris] and a couple of the guys I liked from my season went down,” he said. “So I’ll be rooting them on and if she thinks she can find love [on BiP] after everything she’s been through, I mean, good for her. One thing, I think — whether you like her or dislike her — you got to give her credit for is there’s no quit in her. I’ll be watching, but focusing my rooting on the boys.”
During the same interview on Courtney Robertson’s podcast, Tino admitted he made a mistake, but downplayed the situation.
“I think if I would’ve done it over again, before I went off and got drunk and kissed somebody else, I would’ve just broken it off there, like, if I had a magic time machine,” Tino said. “If I’m in the situation where I already did my stupid thing — knowing that what I did was, to a lot of people, [a] pretty gray area or not even something wrong and getting the electric chair for it on national TV, yeah, I mean, it’s hard to say [that] I would’ve done everything [the same]. I mean, the punishment was so absurd.”
He added that he doesn’t think him and Rachel would’ve worked out regardless.
“We weren’t right for each other. … I don’t think we’ll ever speak to each other again,” he alleged. “I think, some odd year ago, she tried to call and I just was kind of like, ‘I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the point where we have something to talk about, but this is way too soon for me.’ But personally, I don’t think there’s anything for us to talk about.”
BiP premieres on Thursday, September 28, at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.
