Tyler Cameron is ready to talk about those Hannah Brown headlines.
The former Bachelorette contestant appeared on The Bellas Podcast on Monday, Nov. 29, and expressed his feelings about Hannah's revelation in her book that she was "deeply hurt" when she saw pictures of Tyler out with Gigi Hadid in 2019—days after they reconnected. "I said to Tyler, ‘I'd date Gigi Hadid too if I could. I get it,'" she told People magazine. "But it was not the way I wish it was handled." When it came down to discussing the headline—Nikki Bella put the model in the hot seat.
"So obviously there was a recent headline with Hannah Brown. She came out with a book right and mentioned how she's so heartbroken over rejection," the WWE star said. Brie Bella clarified her twin's statement, "Pretty much boo just put it that Tyler Cameron rejected me and the whole world goes ‘yeah, no s--t,' is what happened."
Nikki then mentioned the text messages that Hannah released, and that's when Tyler cheekily noted, "I have receipts too."
"First of all, you're going to see the level of respect we have for each other," the model said. "The way I talk about her in my book showed nothing but love. We'll see how she talks about me in her book."
Tyler, who is the author of You Deserve Better: What Life Has Taught Me About Love, Relationships, and Becoming Your Best Self, understands that Hannah is going to put herself out there to push her book. And he supports it.
"I hope she's happy, I hope she's successful. You know, she's writing a book, she's got to sell books. She's got to make headlines. Sell them books."
In Hannah's book, God Bless This Mess: Learning to Live and Love Through Life's Best (and worst) Moments the Dancing With the Stars champion reflects on the moment she and Tyler began talking prior to the After the Final Rose ceremony when she realized that she was over Jed Wyatt.
Noting that the pair were talking prior to the taping—although it was "nothing romantic" she was reliving their romance while watching her season of The Bachelorette and she was beginning to feel more drawn to him.
In the beginning of August, she wanted to have a "let's see what happens" date at her place. Hannah admits that things got "hot and heavy" before Tyler hit pause on the moment and they just went to sleep. The next morning, they were spotted by paparazzi after she walked him to his car.
Hannah revealed that he called her two days later, on Aug. 4, and wanted to talk about them being on the same page about them dating other people. She noted that she replied, "not particularly," and then woke up to the infamous paparazzi pics of Tyler out with Gigi Hadid. In that moment, her answer to his question was definitely no.
Tyler and Gigi's romance lasted for about two months. The models split in October of 2019. Meanwhile, Hannah's found the hot to her "mess" with boyfriend, model Adam Woolard.
For more bombshells from Hannah's book, keep scrolling...
When she was 6, Hannah Brown's Aunt LeeLee and two young cousins were murdered at their home in Hamilton, Ala. She recalls sending that something was wrong one May 2001 night when her father had to dash off and miss her dance recital. (Read an exclusive excerpt here.)
Though her mom told her the next day that her departed family members were "angels in heaven," she wouldn't know for a few days that someone had killed them. The story was big local news, but she tried to block out what happened for years until she finally went online to learn the whole story.
Per Hannah's account, an ex-convict who was free on a work release program after serving time for a nonviolent offense—a man whom Lee and her husband Stuart had previously let live in the travel trailer in their yard and hired to do odd jobs—knocked on the door one day when Stu was at work and Lee let him in, since he was hardly a stranger. She left him alone in the kitchen and, when she returned, caught him rifling through her purse. He ended up stabbing her and the children to death. (Wilson Billy Robitaille, who pleaded not guilty, was convicted of multiple counts of capital murder and sentenced to death.)
Her dad's side of the family grew increasingly distant after that and even stopped getting together for holidays, no one wanting to fully deal with the empty chairs. "I'd lost my innocence," Hannah writes, as well as her sense of safety, even at home, and the happy times that her family might have shared if this tragedy had never occurred. She still has trouble sleeping to this day, and wonders whether a diagnosis of narcolepsy a few years ago (she's almost incapable of deep, restorative sleep) was in part brought on by fear.
Her parents didn't believe in counseling, so the healing process didn't really begin until her twenties, Hannah shares, when she started to work through the past trauma with a therapist.
Hannah overcame a terrifying health crisis when she was a child.
She was suffering from severe stomach pain and ended up diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) when she was 10. The agony didn't stop, but a gastrologist said the same thing: IBS. Finally her mom convinced the doctors to take a closer look, and an MRI showed what turned out to be a malignant tumor on her pancreas. The good news was, the cancer was entirely confined to the tumor and had not spread.
Crediting her deep faith, Hannah recalls being 11 years old and anxious to get the tumor removed but otherwise unafraid. She was a bit scared of the prospect of losing her hair, but following a successful surgery, she didn't need chemotherapy or radiation, and after that she became her whole family's de facto spiritual leader.
As early as 4 or 5 years old, Hannah noticed "that my legs were bigger than the legs of the girls beside me" in dance class, and throughout her teens "that comparison in the mirror never went away." She obsessed over how her thighs touched, unlike other girls' legs—or even the legs of her American Girl doll.
Fast-forward to when she entered the competitive world of beauty pageantry, and the suggestions that she lose weight began. "You're so pretty, but if you could just lose ten pounds, you would really see a difference," was a frequent refrain.
Hannah recalls "drowning in insecurity and a self-hatred of my own body" and going on her first diet at 15, following a "pageant expert's" strict regimen. She lost 16 pounds in two weeks and was second-runner-up in her first-ever pageant with a swimsuit competition. She subsequently regained the weight. "It was never healthy," she writes of going up and down and back again on the scale.
When she was 20, a pageant director sent her a picture of another woman with the message, "You need to look like this by orientation week."
"It killed me," she admits.
In hindsight she realizes that, by the time she was competing for Miss USA in 2018, "I might have been dealing with a little bit of anorexia." She had lost her appetite after going through a rough breakup, and then continued to not eat much all the way through winning Miss Alabama USA, dropping from her normal size 4 to 6 to size 00. "I convinced myself that it was OK to eat nothing but one protein bar per day," she writes, recalling how her trainer admonished her to gain some weight before the Miss Alabama final.
At the same time she had developed severe acne, enough so that pageant people were musing, "What are we going to do with your skin?" She didn't place at Miss USA, and she's convinced "the acne did me in."
About a month after the Miss USA pageant, Hannah got a call from a producer on The Bachelor: She'd been anonymously nominated and would she like to audition? (A friend-of-a-friend videographer she'd worked with during the pageant turned out to be her secret nominator.)
She shot a quick video on her phone, sent it in, and set about catching up on the most recent season, "starring a guy named Arie [Luyendyk Jr.]." She also started watching The Bachelorette, and the one guy she thought she herself would like to date was Colton Underwood. She started telling friends she'd only do the show if he was the Bachelor.
Her in-person audition in Atlanta went well and she was invited to the final round in Los Angeles. In an interview, she was taken aback when she was asked if she ever had road rage. She considered herself mild-mannered, having even trained herself to eschew swear words for the likes of "frick" or "shizz." But then she realized she did sometimes lose it in the car, and soon she was "admitting to myself that I had this little tank of rage in a spot beside my stomach."
Two weeks later, she got the official offer to be on The Bachelor.
But first, she wanted to run this by Brady, her on-and-off boyfriend whom she'd first fallen for in freshman Spanish class in high school. (She just admired him from afar for a few years and she recalls getting the Mean Girls treatment from his protective girlfriend, but then they finally got together.)
"A big part of me was hoping he would stop me," Hannah shares. "Even after everything that had happened, I wanted him to fight for me...because if he did, then maybe it could still be us. But he didn't. He didn't even try."
So, she decided that she'd say yes to The Bachelor. She had $70 in the bank and the show was neither paying her nor providing clothes. So, she packed a few things from her own closet and Sherri Hill, who'd designed her dress for Miss USA, loaned her some gowns for the rose ceremonies.
She'd been counting on Colton being her season's Bachelor all along, "but almost immediately I observed that he seemed a lot different when the cameras weren't rolling," she remembers. "He just seemed more uptight, or something. Something was just off." She figured she'd give it time. It was TV, after all, not exactly normal surroundings for a first impression.
On their first one-on-one, she felt herself turning into "Pageant Patty," saying and doing all the so-called right things. Viewers called it "the most cringeworthy date they had ever seen," Hannah shares.
As the weeks went on, she writes that still felt something was off, that Underwood didn't really want to be kissing her (some of the other girls felt the same way, she writes) and it just wasn't right. She tried to push those feelings to the side, trying to believe it when he encouraged her, "Jump with me."
So wasn't she surprised when it all fell apart before the hometown dates.
But, she feels as if the aftermath of their breakup marked the first time that the Bachelor audience started to really connect with her, when she spoke from the bottom of her "scarred, dented, bruised-up heart."
Suffice it to say, Hannah was long gone by the time Colton jumped the fence on his season.
And in April, he came out as gay, telling Good Morning America's Robin Roberts, "I came to terms with that earlier this year and have been processing it."
Watching that, Hannah recalls, she was happy for Colton—and finally she realized why, exactly, things felt off between them, "because he felt off with himself."
Meanwhile, in 2019 she'd only been off The Bachelor for a matter of hours before got the call asking if she'd be interested in being the next Bachelorette, while she was still in the middle of her post-breakup cheeseburger and milkshake.
"F--k you, guys," she admits to telling them, livid that they'd asked while her pain was so raw. So she went home and started to put her heart back together.
And the more she thought about it, the more she realized she should do The Bachelorette.
So began the audition process all over again, and when she made it to the final round in L.A. she actually couldn't believe she'd made it that far "after I came off looking like a psycho on The Bachelor." But not even her jumpsuit ripping right down the middle of her backside as she was getting out of the car for that last interview could stop her.
Instead, she candidly revealed she had a big tear in her pants and she became the first-ever Bachelorette who hadn't made it to a previous Bachelor season's final four.
When that journey began, she was admittedly very attracted to Tyler Cameron right away. She was also "intrigued" by pilot Peter Weber and felt a spark with Luke Parker, whom she'd first met after Colton's After the Final Rose special and who seemed really there for her. Hence Luke getting the first impression rose. And she also liked Nashville native Jed Wyatt, a fellow Southerner who made a "super-fun first impression."
When they started taping the season on March 3, 2019, Brown had kissed five men in her life and slept with two.
"But I had never had sex with somebody after only a couple of months of knowing them," she writes, "and this entire show was shot over eight weeks! There was just no way I would ever feel comfortable enough to do that, I thought. And I really didn't want to have any more sex before marriage, anyway...At least that's what I told myself."
She hit the ground running, as Bachelorettes do.
"I wound up kissing more men in one night than I'd kissed in my whole life," she recalls. But it was a taxing schedule, and within the first couple of weeks of filming she passed out on her way to get her makeup done and was treated at a nearby hospital for dehydration and exhaustion. She returned to work immediately after.
Going on all those dates with one guy after another, "I learned to sort of turn off my feelings," she shares. "It was good for the show, I think. But it wasn't necessarily good for figuring out what my heart really wanted."
All the while, her attraction to Peter was heating up, so by the time they got to the Fantasy Suite in Greece, she hadn't planned to have sex with him but "one thing led to another." She admits to having some "good-girl guilt" the morning after, but overall it was "intimate" and "fun"—and they agreed to keep it between them.
Three nights later, she slept with Jed—also not really planning on it, but "he was the one who felt safe to me," the first guy to whom she admitted she was falling in love. She acknowledges being startled when Jed admitted to her early on that his primary reason for going on the show was to promote his music career, but he's since told her that she had "taken him by surprise" and he'd fallen for her.
After that, "I knew I wasn't going to sleep with the other two men," she writes.
Subsequently, her Fantasy Suite date with Luke quickly devolved "into a nightmare," after which she and Tyler "made out like crazy" (and he gave a great speech) but it didn't go further.
Hannah couldn't fathom sending Peter home, not least because they'd had sex, but she was really talking herself into Jed being the guy. Peter didn't see the dismissal coming. Then she sent Tyler home, 40 minutes before go time.
Now she can see that she was letting outside signs talk over her gut, so by the time Jed got down on one knee and proposed, she said yes as a placeholder, hoping (praying) that she'd fall all the way in love with him once they'd spent more time together. She didn't realize until later that Jed had slipped the Neil Lane ring on her finger on the anniversary of her aunt and cousins' murder. And she felt that was possibly a bad sign.
Unfortunately, she and Jed only got to spend three nights together at the house the production rented for them before they were obliged to stay apart for three months while the show played out. And when they first got there, Jed commented that he thought it was "really cool" that they were engaged and that she hadn't slept with any of the other guys.
She gently reminded him that she'd said she hadn't been intimate with anyone after him.
Hannah writes that Jed started asking all sorts of questions, including who was better endowed, him or Peter? "Why do guys always ask that?" she wonders. "'I don't even remember,' I told him. I just didn't see how answering the question would be good for anybody."
Then it was Hannah's turn to be surprised.
The next day, Jed revealed that "there was a girl spreading a story online, about the two of them hanging out together just before he came on the show." He insisted she hadn't been his girlfriend, they'd "just hung out." Maybe for a month...or maybe just a week...
It wasn't until they got to the airport to fly back to the U.S. (and reality) did she find out that he was ticketed under the name Jared Thomas Wyatt.
When she asked why he'd never told her his actual name, he didn't think it was a big deal. But Hannah was thinking, "How could I be engaged to a man when I didn't even know his real name? And his name was...Jared?"
They got to see each other a few weeks later in California, for a secret "Happy Couple Retreat," and Hannah was remembering why she said yes to Jed's proposal. He was safe, they were from similar backgrounds and, by then at least, they knew a lot about each other. At the same time, she knew she still had feelings for both Peter and Tyler.
What perhaps was a reprieve came in the form of People's interview with a woman who insisted she'd been Jed's girlfriend, leading up until the night before he left for The Bachelorette and him telling her he loved her right before producers took his phone away. Not just someone he was hanging out with, but a woman with a name who went on the record.
"I was so embarrassed," Hannah recalls. "How could I be finding out about all of this at the same exact time as the rest of the world?"
Jed had mentioned a woman he'd drunkenly said "I love you" to, who he'd gone to the Bahamas "as friends" with. He insisted he hadn't lied, but rather he just hadn't told her everything.
On her After the Final Rose special, she realized she was totally over Jed, and she knew Peter was likely going to be the next Bachelor.
But she and Tyler were already talking and texting by the time the show taped, "nothing super romantic," but the more she was reliving their romance while watching The Bachelorette, the more re-drawn to him she felt.
Not wanting to deal with paparazzi and countless people's cell phone cameras, they had a let's-see-what-happens date at her place. It got "hot and heavy," but Tyler pumped the brakes and they just went to sleep. The next morning they walked to pick up breakfast and she waited around the corner when he went in. They ate at her place and she walked him to his car—where paps were waiting.
Two days later, Aug, 4, 2019, he called and said he wanted to make sure that she was on the same page about them being able to see other people. She said not particularly, and the next day when she woke up to paparazzi pics of Tyler out with Gigi Hadid, she realized the answer was definitely no.
The next month, she was asked to film some scenes for Peter's season of The Bachelor—and being under contract, she couldn't say no. When her limo rolled up to the mansion, a panic attack prevented her from getting out of the car for more than an hour.
At the same time, Hannah's championship run on Dancing With the Stars had begun, a physical and emotional roller coaster that at least ended with her hoisting the mirror-ball trophy at the end.
But then she was called back to The Bachelor to "host" one of his group dates. During that awkward reunion, he actually told her that, if she wanted to be together, he'd quit the show right then and there.
Not wanting to make that decision in a split second, she told him to keep going but recalls telling him, "'Look, if this doesn't work out for you, I'll still be here. There's no way I'm going to be dating anybody.'"
Peter ended up proposing to Hannah Ann Sluss—but before his season premiered on ABC, Hannah reveals that he called her and told her he was already having doubts and still had feelings for runner-up Madison Prewett.
Hannah saw Peter in person in February 2020, while his season was still airing, at Hannah Godwin and Dylan Barbour's engagement party. Not wanting to draw too much attention, he texted her when he was outside in his car to come out and he'd drive her home. On the way, he told her he'd already called it off with Hannah Ann and his attempt to reconnect with Madison had already fizzled.
He had a flight in the morning, so he invited her to come back to his (and his parents') house while he packed. His mother offered her Peter's brother's room for the night, a scenario Hannah found "all so weird." Peter texted her, "Come cuddle," and they ended up having sex.
"And I'm not sure what to say about it, except that it wasn't good," Hannah writes. Probably not least because of what happened in the morning: She woke up and he was dressed in his uniform. He told her to take her time, that he had to go but his dad was looking forward to saying hi. When she went downstairs, Peter was still there, and he offered her $100 for her to take an Uber. She accepted and made polite chit-chat with Peter's father while she waited for her ride.
That night he texted her, telling her thanks for being there for him. She writes that she felt horrible and told him that they'd been "pretty reckless," to which he replied, "'Yeah, maybe we shouldn't play with that fire again.'"
In future texts, he was too nonchalant for her taste, and then he started talking about his feelings for Madison again.
(Peter confirmed the crux of this revelation, saying on the Bachelors in the City podcast, "We spent the night with each other, and that was it. That was the last time that I saw her physically." He added, It wasn't the same as I think we had originally felt. But, nonetheless, it was great to talk and just have someone that kind of understood where I was coming from.")
Much was made of the little COVID quarantine pod Hannah formed with Tyler and his buddies in 2020, an arrangement that lasted for about a month and produced a wealth of TikTok and Instagram content. But neither of them was in a good place (Tyler's mom had just died and her brother was in rehab in Texas following an accidental overdose) and though they slept in the same bed for 20 days, he never even tried to kiss her, she writes.
Around the same time she had become close friends with incoming Bachelor Matt James, who advised Hannah that she wasn't doing anything wrong with regard to Tyler, that their friend was "trying to distract himself from everything."
After she went back to Alabama, Tyler texted her to make sure she was home safely, and then she didn't hear from him for a week. Ultimately she realized that, no matter how much they talked, she always felt like "his bench girl...the backup player who never got to play in the game."
Hannah eventually told him it was too painful for her to just be his friend, and a friend he didn't prioritize at that, and his reply was, "'Well...if you rock with me, you rock with me. If you don't, you don't.'"
She writes, "I wish I was making that up."