The Bachelor’s Nick Viall Reacts to Vanessa Grimaldi Saying She Didn't Want to Get Engaged
Nick Viall is reacting to his ex-fiancée’s recent comments saying that she never wanted to get engaged in the first place.
Viall, 39, left his season of The Bachelor engaged to Vanessa Grimaldi, but the pair ended up breaking things off five months after season 21 finale aired. Speaking on her friend Taylor Nolan’s podcast Let’s Talk About It last month, Grimaldi, 32, revealed that she didn’t initially want to end the show engaged, but wanted to continue to date.
Viall joined fellow Bachelor Nation alum Kaitlyn Bristowe for the live taping of her Off the Vine podcast on the Los Angeles leg of her KB Fall Crawl Tour on Monday, and the former Bachelorette held nothing back, asking Viall straight away what he thought of his ex’s words.
“We’re going to play a nice little game of ‘Truth or Drink,'” Bristowe told the audience. “And I’m going to start it off by asking Nick a hard-hitting question about Vanessa.”
Viall clarified that he was allowed to drink instead of answering a question before agreeing to let Bristowe continue, and once he was assured that was how the game was played, she proceeded.
RELATED: Vanessa Grimaldi Says She ‘Didn’t Want to Get Engaged’ to Nick Viall on The Bachelor
“Vanessa has spoken out – pretty recently – about not wanting to get engaged on the show,” Bristowe said. “How did you feel about her talking about this publicly? Tell us the truth, or drink.”
After some engagement with the audience — who were encouraging Viall to skip the question and drink instead of answering — Viall asked, “So, the question is, what do I think about it? Or not, whether it was true?”
“Yeah, what do you think about it?” Bristowe clarified.
“Uh, I mean, it was fine. Right? I mean, like, was I irritated?” Viall said. Bristowe joked that his reaction “to everything” is “it was fine,” to which Viall added, “Well, you try to be level-headed.”
On the Let’s Talk About It podcast, Grimaldi — who is currently dating Canadian businessman Josh Wolfe — said The Bachelor didn’t air a conversation between her and Viall discussing their engagement.
“I didn’t want to get engaged. They didn’t air this,” she said. “I had a conversation with him, and I said, ‘Listen, wouldn’t it be better if we just date outside of the show and then get engaged? Because that’d be more meaningful. We’d get to know each other.’“
“He said, ‘I know to you it could be just a piece of jewelry, but there’s so much meaning towards us leaving engaged because there’s going to be so much attention,’” Grimaldi recalled Viall saying.
“There’s going to be so much backlash on us once we’re done with the show. At least this is going to hold us so much more. It’s going to hold us together. It’s going to hold us together more than it’s true. ‘Cause you have, like, something you’re working towards, right?’ “
Grimaldi added that she “wouldn’t have said yes if I didn’t picture him as someone that I could’ve potentially grown with.”
“I think if we weren’t engaged, we would’ve broken up sooner,” she added.