Haley Stevens is opening up to ET about healing her broken heart and why she doesn't think Wyatt is a 'bad person.'
Haley Stevens still thinks her ex-boyfriend, Jed Wyatt, is a good person.
The Nashville-based musician spoke out for the first time on-camera to ET's Lauren Zima on Thursday, explaining that she didn't mean to cause controversy by coming forward about her ex. She just wanted to have her story told.
"People were saying they were going to tell my story -- me, real girl, real life -- and I wasn't going to have any control of that," Stevens shared, tearing up. "It didn't seem fair that nobody was going to stand up for me here."
Scandal erupted this week when Stevens publicly claimed she was in a relationship with Wyatt as he headed off to date Hannah Brown on season 15 of The Bachelorette. Stevens told ET she and Wyatt dated for four months before he headed off to film the show in early March -- and that he had told her three weeks into their relationship that he was in the casting process for the show.
Wyatt admitted in a recent episode that his intentions appearing on The Bachelorette were to further his music career, but made no mention of a girlfriend. Exclusive screenshots of what Stevens said is her conversation with Wyatt from March 12 shows him allegedly telling her he loves her as he hops on a plane to film the show.
"I don't think that he's a bad person. I don't know what happened there. I don't know if his feelings changed for me, I don't know if he fell in love with her. I don't know what the circumstances are, necessarily," Stevens shared. "I never planned to come forward. I didn't want to be involved, I didn't want anything to do with the show. I have my own things going on. But when I have people saying my name has been brought up to them three times and they want the story and they're going to tell the story, I'm thinking, 'OK, well, you're going to tell the story without me?' I don't have a major television network at my back. I'm sitting in Nashville, Tennessee, with these people reaching out to me."
Stevens said all she wanted from Wyatt was a phone call. "I wait until after the premiere of the show, he gets back on social media, I see his friends out the night that he got back," she claimed.
Stevens feels "embarrassed" by the situation and understands how Wyatt and Brown could have made a real connection on the show. "I would not have fallen head over heels for someone that's a bad person. And beyond that, she wouldn't have," Stevens said of Brown.
"I would 100 percent believe that everyone loved him. He's charming and funny and the way he's acting [on the show], that's who he is," she added.
Stevens is focused on healing her broken heart, and channeling her emotions into new music. "The thing is, with Hannah, people keep saying, 'Did you have any regard for her feelings?'" she said. "Someone told me they love me, this is what's best for them, I trusted in that. I could never have known that this is what the situation would be."
The singer said that before Wyatt left for The Bachelorette, she was "operating on this idea of hypotheticals and nothing's real and it's all acting."
"I could never have known that feelings would be involved or hearts would be broken. I know that this story is hurtful to her, and she's feeling what I have felt, and that is not an easy thing to do or know that I've done. None of it's easy. So many people are tied up in this," she explained.
"Me coming forward with this story, my message in this, is not in any way negative toward anyone or trying to be hurtful to anyone," Stevens said, adding that she's not looking for Bachelor fame herself. "This is as much as I can take."
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