For all of the contestants from The Golden Bachelorette — except Chock Chapple, who continues planning a wedding with Joan Vassos — the search for love has continued off-camera. Some have been successful, including Mark Anderson, who hard-launched a relationship with One Tree Hill actress Barbara Alyn Woods in October. Apparently he’s not the only one pursuing someone from TV, because Kelly Bensimon of RHONY revealed that she’s had not one but three of Joan Vassos’ exes slide into her DMs.
There’s been no word about who will lead The Golden Bachelor Season 2 — and it doesn’t look like the spinoff will make it in time for the 2025 TV schedule — so Joan Vassos’ mansion men have had to jump back into the dating pool all on their own. They’ve apparently learned to slide into DMs, too, as 56-year-old Kelly Bensimon visited the Almost Famous podcast, saying she’d gotten a DM from Pascal Ibgui. She recalled (via US Weekly):
Pascal is like, ‘I’m French,’ [and] well, my ex-husband [Gilles Bensimon] was French, and he goes, ‘I live in Chicago,’ and I’m from Illinois originally. So he was like, ‘I’m a hairdresser,’ and I was, like, ‘Oh wow.’
The Real Housewives of New York alum said that while she was open to dating The Golden Bachelorette runner-up, she was still carrying baggage from some previous relationships, including her ex-fiancé Scott Litner, who she split from in June 2024.
He wasn’t the only Joan Vassos reject to exchange messages with Kelly Bensimon. She said on the I Do Part 2 podcast that she’d been interested in Guy Gansert, telling the hosts:
He seemed very organized with his thoughts and his intentions and I was like, ‘You know what, that’s what I need.’ I’m looking for solid. I’m looking for the rock. I’m not looking for the roll.
However, Kelly Bensimon said after she and the 66-year-old ER doctor exchanged numbers, he started texting her “novellas,” and “going on and on and on and on” about things he liked, before ultimately telling her that he was dating someone else.
That’s not even where the RHONY star’s associations with The Golden Bachelorette end. Back on Almost Famous, Kelly Bensimon said she’d also connected with Bachelor Nation fan favorite Gary Levingston, 65. She revealed:
Gary and I got along really really well. I don’t know what the next step is. We text and we became friendly, which was great.
That sounds really sweet, and I can’t say what the next step for them is either, but I do know that Gary Levingston is beach-bound for Bachelor in Paradise Season 10.
It was revealed on Grant Ellis’ Bachelor season finale that Levingston and Leslie Fhima (Gary Turner’s runner-up from The Golden Bachelor) were among the Goldens who would be joining their younger counterparts on the spinoff this summer. Is it bad that now I’m desperate for some Housewives to come on board as well?
We don’t have a premiere date for Bachelor in Paradise yet, but when it comes, I’ll be keeping hope alive that Kelly Bensimon cameos to meet her men.