The Season 20 Bachelorette is a Georgia Peach. Bachelor star Zach Shallcross may have eliminated Charity Lawson following his visit to her hometown, but that’s turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
From the very beginning of the Women Tell All episode earlier this week, host Jesse Palmer repeatedly teased that he would be “changing someone’s life forever” later in the show. Us Weekly reported that he knocked on the door of one of the women eliminated during the season.
Charity had been told in advance that she would be doing a “promotional video” for the show. Jesse asked her a series of either/or questions as part of a (fake) game. The last choice was “Bachelor in Paradise or The Bachelorette?”
She answered, “The Bachelorette, of course.” Okay then. Wish granted. “Are you kidding?” she gasped. “No way! I’m gonna cry. Yes, absolutely [I’ll be the Bachelorette]. 100 percent! … I’m shaking right now,” Charity added.
Jesse told her, “In a couple of months, there’s a very good chance that you’re going to be engaged to the love of your life . . . Your life really is going to change. It’s never going to be the same. It could not happen to a more deserving person.”
Even though it was late, Charity immediately called her mom and dad to give them the good news. “I can’t wait to show little girls that look like me that being in a position like this is possible. I know that I’ll be making a lot of people proud,” she told her parents.
Charity’s journey was full of ups and downs. Early on she won a group date rose, but the moment was spoiled by Christina Mandrell. When the content creator expressed her disappointment at not receiving the rose herself, she sparked an argument with the other women and made Charity cry.
Next her one-on-one date in London was canceled due to Zach’s Covid diagnosis. When she finally got her long-awaited date in Estonia, Katherine Izzo decided she would just “borrow” Zach for a minute and took him out into the hallway for a quick snog. Zach returned wearing Kat’s lipgloss, which didn’t go over well with the other women. They claimed Kat had “stolen” Charity’s time, and she was “classless, selfish and disrespectful.”
Charity made it to the final four women, which meant she got to take Zach home to meet her parents during Hometown Week. She was the first of the remaining ladies to tell Zach she was “falling in love,” but sadly she was eliminated at the next Rose Ceremony.
Even though he didn’t “see a future” with Charity, Zach was rooting for her to be the next Bachelorette. “She knows what she wants,” he told Us Weekly at the WTA taping. “She is so confident, she’s so sweet, and, you know, she has a great heart.”
“She’s someone from the very beginning that . . . was just trustworthy,” he continued. “She was someone that I asked to, like, get her take on things, and while there was some drama in the house early, she was always someone that I believed in [and] I trusted it too. I think she would absolutely kill it as Bachelorette.”
Before the announcement was made, Jesse said there were “five or six” women from Zach’s season who could be The Bachelorette. “It’s hard because I feel like in past seasons we’ve had an obvious choice, like, two, maybe three [choices],” he said in February 2023. “I feel like this season, there’s five or six that could be tremendous.”
When he heard that several Season 27 contestants were in favor of Charity getting the job, the host added, “I totally get it. I think she’d be awesome.”
Charity will be the fourth Black Bachelorette, following Rachel Lindsay (Season 13), Tayshia Adams (who finished Season 16 when Clare Crawley left the show early), and Michelle Young (season 18). Matt James (Season 25) remains the first and only Black Bachelor.
TELL US – WERE YOU ROOTING FOR CHARITY TO BE THE NEXT BACHELORETTE? IF NOT, WHO WOULD HAVE BEEN YOUR CHOICE INSTEAD? ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING CHARITY AS THE BACHELORETTE?
[Photo Credit: ABC/Ricky Middlesworth]
