Eight years before Becca Kufrin parlayed her public Bachelor dumping into the plum Bachelorette gig, producers tried that move with Melissa. They even enlisted Jason Mesnick—the guy who had just ended their engagement in front of ABC’s cameras to work things out with runner-up Molly Malaney.
“That was their number one thing of doing the thing with Melissa,” Jason explained to E! News of the show asking him to go through with the on-camera breakup. “They wanted to deliver her as the Bachelorette to America. They had me call her!”
Yes, Jason phoned his ex-fiancé to discuss being the next lead because she was “mad” at producers, according to the former Bachelor. “In their mind, they’re like, ‘We gave you Molly, now can you give us Melissa?”
Melissa passed, eventually going on to marry an old boyfriend, Tye Strickland, and the couple now have three children, a daughter named Ava Grace, and two sons, Beckett and Cayson. But she did remain in the Bachelor family, serving as a co-host on the spinoff series Bachelor Pad.
