Bachelor Nation fans saw Susie Evans and Clayton Echard find love on Season 26 of “The Bachelor,” and after the show, they moved in together in Virginia.
Susie and Clayton eventually split but have been continuing to support each other on social media since their breakup.
Now, the two just reunited on Susie’s new podcast “Live, Laugh, Lies” to chat about a scandal Clayton faced around a fake paternity claim.
After the pair’s breakup in September 2022, a woman stated that Clayton was the father of her child, even though the two chatted briefly and he had never been intimate with her.
“I remember you telling me and I was so angry for you,” Susie reflected.
Clayton shared how the person making the claim was adamant and threatened for months that she was going to go public with the information. She ultimately did when Clayton hosted a local reality pickleball TV show.
“She launched it the first day that I was hosting because she wanted to essentially wreck me and get them to either fire me on the spot, or get me to be in my head where I couldn’t do my job,” he revealed.
Clayton went on to say, “I couldn’t believe it. Like, at first early on, I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m actually dealing with a person [like this].’ I can’t believe I’ve come across this. This is the stuff that you see in documentaries. This is on the news. Like, I grappled because I believe in the goodness of people.”
The former Bachelor opened up about how the situation started to affect him, and how his dad supported him during that time.
He shared, “I had debilitating anxiety. I laid in bed for days where I just stared at the ceiling… Thankfully, I had a really good conversation with my dad one day… He was like, ‘You laying here in bed is not gonna do anything and you can’t control this… so choose to react how you can, which is to just go on with your life.’ And so I started to do that. I started to get up out of bed, I started going back to my job, and I was like, ‘I’ll just deal with it.’”
Clayton then shared how this woman started to stalk his every move and sent mail to his workplace and two separate people in Miami.
“She started sending letters to my work. She sent a processor to serve me papers at my work. They just show up… and she would do that just to humiliate me,” he said.
Clayton continued, “And then I went to Miami to see my cousin… and she sees I’m in Miami, so what does she try to do? Serve me the parenting plan at two women’s addresses. One of the girls, we weren’t dating, but we were considering a relationship. And the other one was Jessica from Zach’s season [because] somebody asked me on a podcast if there was a girl [I’d] be interested in on Zach’s season, who would it be, and I said her. She seemed sweet. Now, neither of [the papers] were successfully served… but she just kept trying to serve me papers.”
He then revealed that after some investigation, he found out her full-time job was working as a scam artist.
Susie, shocked, said, “That’s actually wild that she’s a full-time scam artist. You’re the fourth person she’s scammed like this.”
Clayton went on to share that since it was a scam and there was no legitimate proof of evidence, the claim ultimately got dismissed.
He also expressed how thankful he is for his online community for helping him through that trying time and how now he feels like he can be himself.
“I finally get to be the real version of me, which I had never been my entire life,” he admitted, “I wrote in my journal six months ago that the old me died, but it was a good thing. I wrote it like, ‘Hey, this people-pleaser version of me that never felt good enough is gone.’ I’ll never ever again let somebody tell me what my worth is. I know what my worth is.”
In reflecting on that time and Susie asking what he learned from it, Clayton shared that he feels much more confident in who he is now and has grown a lot.
He shared, “I needed to go down into the darkest valleys in order to climb to the highest peaks. But also all of the valuable life lessons and the most growth occur in places of adversity in the valley.”
What a roller coaster of an experience!
We are glad to hear that Clayton is doing well now, and love that he and Susie still show up for each other.
We are continuing to wish Clayton and Susie both the best!
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