The Golden Bachelor runner-up Leslie Fhima has opened up about her two divorces and where she currently stands with her two ex-husbands.
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Prior to signing up for ABC's first The Golden Bachelor season starring Gerry Turner, Leslie had been married twice before.
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Leslie first tied the knot when she was 21-years-old to a man named Brad, with whom she welcomed her son Zack.
"Being divorced is not like the plague. I mean, it happens," Leslie told Serena Pitt and Joe Amabile during a recent episode of the "Bachelor Happy Hour" podcast.
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"With Brad and I, we were just really young. We kind of just grew. I don't like to say 'grew apart,' but we just became different."
And Leslie's second marriage was with a man named David, who was apparently unfaithful.
"With David, there was infidelity in that marriage," Leslie shared.
"I tried to keep my family together as long as I possibly could, knowing what was going on, and I just couldn't do it. I wanted to stay married. That was all I wanted -- was to be a wife, a mother, have a home, and have it all."
Leslie and David welcomed two children together -- her daughter Chloe and son Eli.
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"[The marriage] didn't work out, and at no fault of my own. I just couldn't stay married to someone and be in a marriage with three people," Leslie explained with a laugh.
"My children, you know, they understand. They love their dad, and they love me. I don't talk badly about him because I have nothing bad to say."
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Leslie suggested that she actually prides herself on maintaining a healthy relationship with her exes.
"I don't really break up and then be mean about it," Leslie said. "Zack's dad, we were high school sweethearts, and we are close. I mean, we've always been."
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Leslie insisted that she thinks Brad "is great," and she added, "If I needed something in the middle of the night, if I called him, he'd help me. And I'm very good friends with his siblings and his cousins. Minneapolis is a small big town, so everybody knows each other."
Leslie and David, however, "obviously" went "through some hard things" together.
"But I can say now we're okay and we see each other and we share children," Leslie explained.
"And these children are half of both of us, and I don't want to ever say anything disparaging about them because they are my children's fathers."
Leslie's heartbreaking storyline on The Golden Bachelor was that she never felt "chosen" in her life by men.
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Leslie always wanted a happily-ever-after ending with a man and to live out "until death do us part" with her husband, but things just didn't work out that way for her.
Leslie was therefore devastated when Gerry rejected her and dumped her in second place on The Golden Bachelor.
Gerry broke up with Leslie in her hotel room in Costa Rica before proposing marriage to his The Golden Bachelor winner, Theresa Nist, with whom he's still engaged and planning an early January 2024 wedding.
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Leslie and Gerry's breakup was one of the hardest to watch in The Bachelor franchise history, but Gerry admitted to Access Hollywood that, if he could go back in time, he wouldn't have treated Leslie any different or gone about their breakup in a different way.
"I have no regrets there," Gerry said, even when considering the repercussions of having told Leslie that he was in love with her and she was The One for him before dumping her.
"I had those emotions and those feelings in that moment, and I've said to Theresa, 'I believed that I was in love with these women until I knew I wasn't.' And the moment I knew I wasn't, it was one thousand percent clear for me."
Gerry added, "So I really can't say I have regrets. It's just part of the process that you have to go through."
Leslie dropped tidbits about what Gerry had told her behind closed doors in the Fantasy Suite to make her think that she was his final choice on the "Bachelor Happy Hour" podcast.
"I don't want to say everything that he said, but it was 100 percent certainty when I woke up the next morning that I was going to be it," Leslie explained.
Leslie said Gerry had made plans with her for the future.
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"He said, kind of like, 'Save the date. This is what we're going to do. I can't wait for us -- just two more days and we'll be done with this,'" she recalled, adding, "[Gerry said], 'We'll be together and start our life.'"
The 64-year-old fitness instructor from Minneapolis, MN, vented about how she "would've been happy with" a simple, "I love you" from Gerry.
"But he took it to a different level," Leslie claimed.
"And when we woke up the next morning and he left, he turned around three times and blew me kisses. He didn't want to leave, and that's why I wasn't worried that he was going on a date! I just knew that he had to get through the motions of it."
Leslie reiterated how she felt "100 percent sure" that she was "it" for Gerry.
"I mean, he didn't say, 'I have such a hard decision to make.' Nothing like that. So I just didn't think [he'd pick Theresa]," Leslie said.
She added, "We talked for hours, and there was so much I wanted to tell him about me. And he wanted to tell me about him... There were things he said to me in the overnight that alluded to his [next] overnight with Theresa, that it was not going to be the same."
Gerry might be the first of Leslie's exes with whom she doesn't remain friends. Leslie told Gerry on After the Final Rose that she didn't accept his apology, and she questioned his integrity on the "Bachelor Happy Hour" podcast.
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