The current franchise lead had some hard moments while filming the show.
Clayton Echard's Bachelor journey was anything but easy. While speaking with ET, Clayton revealed when he hit his lowest while filming the season, and opened up about the surrounding controversy that's sure to only ramp up amid the final few episodes.
After saying goodbye to Cassidy, Shanae, Sarah and others for reasons of questionable intentions, Clayton was left with three women: Susie, Gabby and Rachel. According to one preview, though, the possibility of someone being there for the wrong reasons remained, even with his final three women.
"I had to figure out who was here for me and who might be here for an opportunity. Let's just be real, it is what it is, but not everybody probably came here for me. That's OK," Clayton told ET. "I think that's just the climate that I was in. I had to try to navigate that and figure out who genuinely wanted to establish a connection and who maybe had ulterior motives."
In the preview in question, Clayton exclaims, "I’ve given you everything! Don’t f**k with me. Did you just play me this entire time?"
"I'm not going to say how many, but there's some women that I felt, yeah, might have had their own agenda for why they came there. A fear of mine was, maybe there's more and maybe I just haven't been able to see it, because they've done such a good job of hiding it," Clayton said. "More of that will be figured out as time goes on, but I was in a very dangerous spot mentally when I started to question the integrity of the entire experience."
Things will also take a turn when Clayton confesses to being intimate with two women and being in love with three. The Bachelor cautions America to "reserve judgment" until they know the full story.
"I will not have a 100 percent of people on my side. I don't know if I'll have 50 percent. I don't know if I'm going to have even 25 percent," Clayton told ET of how people will react to his shocking confession. "I'm not looking for everybody to side with me. I just did what I thought was best. I navigated a really, really sticky situation that... I don't want to ever be in again."
Clayton would like people to remember that the whole situation happened "because I allowed myself to open up and be vulnerable and give all of the relationships a chance."
"What I said felt justified based off of what all had occurred," he said. "So I hope people see it for what it was and understand that, 'OK, he said this because of this reason.' I hope that will be obvious, but that is yet to be seen yet... Everyone has to kind of be patient, I hope, and allow the full story to come out."
In another preview, Clayton tells his parents about his predicament, and his dad tells him he "screwed the pooch."
"His comment was justified based off of what he heard," Clayton acknowledged. "I can only tell them so much in the time that they were there... but he was upset and he realized that I was in a situation that I was going to have a lot of trouble trying to work my way out of."
"He just knew that I had a lot of my work cut out for me and why I did," he added. "I really had to dig deep and continue to stick to my guns and follow my heart and hope that it would end up the way that I wanted to."
As he prepares to have America watch his journey unfold, Clayton told ET, "I wish I could say cautiously optimistic, but I don't really feel optimistic about it as far as how it's going to be received."
"I think it's going to foster a lot of discussion. There's going to be a lot of opinions. I know that, ultimately, I just hope that people understand that I did what I did with the best of intentions and that I'm not a bad person," he said. "I just followed my heart, but unfortunately doing that led me down a very unfavorable path that made things extremely challenging."
"I hope people understand that, 'Hey, it's a lot. I don't think we can peg this guy as a bad guy from just what happened... He had a lot on his shoulders,'" he added. "But again, I accept full responsibility for everything I did. People will decide to cast judgment on my character when it's all said and done and they have the right to do that."
Clayton Echard's season of The Bachelor airs Mondays on ABC. The "Women Tell All" episode will air on Tuesday, March 8. ET has got you covered throughout the entirety of Clayton's season with all of our Bachelor content.
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