Ben Higgins and Becca Tilley candidly discuss why he dumped her before 'The Bachelor' hometowns

Ben Higgins and Becca Tilley have finally hashed out why Ben dumped her right before hometown dates on The Bachelor's 20th season last year.


Becca appeared on the Wednesday episode of The Ben and Ashley I: Almost Famous podcast during which Ben explained why he dumped her in favor of Caila Quinn, Amanda Stanton, JoJo Fletcher and Lauren Bushnell.

"This is really my thought process. Becca knows that I think she is wonderful. Becca knows how much fun we had together," Ben said.

"I didn't on the show, but I know now, apparently," Becca, a former chiropractic assistant from San Diego, CA, noted with a laugh.

"Becca, we had so much fun together. We were great," Ben assured her.


"[But] I knew that Lauren was someone who was extremely special to me. I knew that Lauren was possibly going to be somebody I proposed to. Now, there were some people who were kind of sneaking up into those feelings as well at the time."

Ben was likely referencing JoJo, whom he professed his love to before the Final Rose Ceremony when he proposed marriage to Lauren.

"I thought that if I knew that was kind of where my heart was leading, that to bring Becca back to her hometown would be so hard on her and her family. And the reason I thought like that and felt like that was because I saw it with [Nick Viall]'s family," Ben explained.

"I saw how emotional it was for his second hometown [date on The Bachelorette], when [his family] didn't know whether he was going to end up with Kaitlyn or not. They were so torn with that, and my thought was... The families don't sign up for this. We do."

Ben's visit to Becca's hometown would have been her family's second stint on the ABC reality dating series, as the bachelorette finished as the runner-up on Chris Soules' edition of The Bachelor just one season prior.


Ben continued, "So if I could have taken Becca to Jamaica, I would have loved to."

"So would I have -- just to hang," Becca chimed in.

"But it wasn't right, and so I had to do the hard thing and send her home from Warsaw, [Indiana]," Ben admitted on the podcast. 

"I remember after the show being with Lauren, and I was like, 'You know what? There's not a lot of things I need to answer to, but Becca is one of those things.' I wanted Becca to know that was a pretty terrible situation, because earlier in the season, I had promised her that I would never lead her on and I would always be very straightforward with her."

Ben then joked that on The Bachelor, you have to lead everybody on because no one knows how they really feel until the very end.


"I will say this. I did have to let Becca go. It wasn't fun. I could probably have done it better," Ben confessed. "I didn't, at that point, know what was right and what was wrong. But she ripped me a pretty good one that night when we were sitting on the bench. It was a side of Becca I hadn't seen yet."

The pair can clearly laugh off the situation now, with Becca telling Ben that they were just friends all along despite her very emotional The Bachelor exit.

"I was so ticked because I had been through Chris' season being the cool girl... I didn't cry. I cried when I talked to Chris' mom and that was it. And then I go on Ben's season, and I feel like I was kept around just until producers could get tears on me. I feel like you pushed me to my breaking point," Becca said, revealing that she was joking around but sort of serious at the same time. 

Ben denied being asked by producers to keep Becca around for that reason, saying he was not forced to say or do anything when he was the The Bachelor star.

Ben and Becca are ironically both single right now, as they publicly split from their significant others in May of this year.


Ben and Lauren called it quits on their engagement after dating for over a year, while Becca had been romantically involved with The Bachelorette alum Robert Graham.






About The Author: Elizabeth Kwiatkowski