Corinne Olympios says she has no ill will toward DeMario Jackson in the aftermath of the ‘Bachelor in Paradise’ scandal.
If you recall, a producer accused DeMario of sexually assaulting Corinne during a night in the hot tub. An investigation determined that DeMario was completely innocent and that no assault took place.
via NYDN:
Corinne Olympios sat down with “Paradise” host Chris Harrison Tuesday night in her highly promoted return to the series and maintained that she does not blame DeMario Jackson, the male contestant, for the incident in which a producer complained that she was too drunk to consent to their hook-up.
“I really just want people to know that I don’t blame DeMario,” she said. “I honestly don’t feel like he did anything wrong, especially because everybody thought that I was just, you know, having fun and being Corinne…I never pointed fingers at DeMario. I never said a bad word about DeMario.”
Olympios took aim at the media instead, and told Harrison that the barrage of reports that emerged once the scandal broke made it difficult for her to go out in public.
“To even just get eggs from the grocery story, my face was all over every magazine and I had to check out and everyone’s staring,” she said. “You’re just looking at them and it’s like, ‘I’m not what you’re thinking right now.'”
Olympios added that she’d had a difficult time accepting that her story was being spread by people who did not have all the facts.
“The media wants to paint you a certain way that you know you’re just not. You know who you are inside, and it’s so hard that these people have become experts on you and your life and think they were there and know exactly what happened. No, you weren’t there!” she told Harrison.
The reality star, 24, admitted that she had little recollection of the incident, as she had unknowingly mixed medication and alcohol. She also claimed she found it worrisome that, despite the fact that she was blacked out, she appeared to be her normal self to her fellow “Paradise” contestants during the incident.
“There’s no way for you guys to know that, like, she’s mentally checked out. Like, Corinne is not here right now. Which is beyond scary,” she said.
And though she says she wishes the best for Jackson, she did admit that his quick defense sent up several red flags.
“I was a little bit nervous to talk to him, because he did run to the media, and I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire,” she said of lying low in the beginning. “I can’t help but feel like maybe he felt like I thought that he did something to me.”
Production of the “Bachelor” spin-off was shut down in June after the producer complained. Jackson was later cleared of any wrongdoing after Warner Bros. opened an internal investigation, and production promptly resumed.
Olympios’s sit-down with Harrison marked the second time Tuesday the reality star spoke out about the scandal on ABC.
Earlier in the day, she clarified that her “victim” statement was misconstrued, and that she only believed herself to be a victim of the media, not Jackson.
“I was a victim of just being blown into the media and having people make these crazy assumptions and judgments about what happened that day. I was really a victim of the media,” she said on “Good Morning America.”
Jackson had a sit-down with Harrison of his own last week, and tearfully said that the accusation of sexual assault was “every man’s biggest fear.”
Corinne and her lawyer TRIED to pull the ‘white woman victim’ card, but thankfully for DeMario the evidence didn’t back it up. She knew exactly what she was doing.
