The lawyer is opening up about his past struggles.
Craig Robinson is getting candid about his past struggles.
The former Bachelorette contestant -- who competed for the heart of Ali Fedotwosky in 2010 -- revealed on a Thursday appearance on the Reality Steve podcast that he had attempted suicide last year.
Robinson shared that he started using cocaine at age 18. He said he was able to pass The Bachelorette's routine drug test because of how fast cocaine passes through the system, but continued to exhibit addictive behavior on and off the show.
“[While filming the show, cocaine] wasn’t something that I needed necessarily throughout the day,” he stated. “But certainly, with the amount of alcohol that I had available to me on the show, I made do with what I had. … I drank every day on that show. I hope that doesn’t come across in any way as me somehow blaming anyone.”
Robinson said his substance abuse intensified in the years that followed, because he was suddenly getting “paid to go to parties and just go drink and be offered drugs.”
“I wasn’t ready to call it quits on this whole thing until I was ready, until it really dragged me emotionally, mentally, spiritually into the ground... to the point that, like I said to you before, that I genuinely did not want to live under the circumstances that I was living under," he said.
The lawyer's close friend and Bachelor alum, Gia Allemand, died by suicide in 2013. After that, Robinson said he dedicated himself to suicide prevention work. “I was getting to a place in my own mind where I was starting to have those same kind of thoughts,” he recalled. “That I knew how deep my situation was starting to get because my reliance on drugs was really starting to ramp up at that point.”
Things took a dark turn for Robinson in late 2017. In February 2018, Robinson quit his job, and just after a few months of "almost pure isolation from the world," he attempted to hang himself in June. "I had drank a lot of whiskey, like I said, had taken a few sleeping pills and was also on cocaine, so there was quite a mixture of things going on in my body at that point in time,” he explained. “But I’ll tell you that it was something that I really, like, deeply thought about for about the week before that.”
Luckily, Robinson said he "wasn't able to actually bring myself to do it." He sought support from his family and checked into a rehab facility in Philadelphia in July. Following 30 days of treatment, he entered another program in Florida.
“I decided to move down here because I developed a really strong group of people down here, friends that are sober and know the lay of the land and how to stay sober and have fun in sobriety,” he expressed. "That’s really what I needed, just to hear that things were gonna be okay. There was hope out there.”
If you or someone you know is in emotional distress or considering suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
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