NEED TO KNOW
Theresa Nist is responding to Gerry Turner’s latest claims about their relationship.
During an appearance on the Nov. 4 episode of the Dear Shandy podcast, Nist, 72, reacted to the former Golden Bachelor’s new novel, Golden Years: What I’ve Learned From Love, Loss, and Reality TV, in which he opened up about the downfall of their short-lived marriage. Throughout the book, Turner, 74, made several allegations about Nist, but she said “not one of the stories that I have read is the way it happened.”
“You did me no favors by marrying a woman that you did not want to marry,” she directed at her ex husband. “You should not. You should have called off the wedding. No matter that we were on TV, that didn’t matter. This was our lives. You should have stopped it.”
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“If you really wanted to be with Leslie, I would have applauded it,” Nist continued, referring to Turner writing about his struggle to choose between her and runner-up Leslie Fhima. “I would have supported you. I would have been so happy.”
Among the many incidents Turner mentioned in the memoir occurred during his first trip to Nist’s home in New Jersey just five days after their wedding, where he claimed that for the entire visit, she asked him to sleep on the sofa and “ignored opportunities for intimacy.” Nist, however, pushed back against this recollection, saying her bed simply wasn’t big enough for the two of them.
“We slept together the first night,” she said, claiming that she told Turner she didn’t sleep well with them both in her full-size bed when he asked the next morning. “He said, ‘Oh, I can sleep on the couch if you want me to.’ He offered to sleep on the couch. I did not ask him to sleep on the couch. And I said, ‘Oh, Gerry, would you?’ I said, ‘I would appreciate it so much.’ Because I knew I was never going to get another bit of sleep the whole time he was there.”
Nist went on to say that she immediately ordered a king-size mattress and, with the help of her daughter, renovated the primary bedroom.
“I even sent him photos of our progress, like, ‘We’re almost done. Look at this. We put it together in a day and it’s beautiful,’” she said. “He never came back. And he doubted it, and he said, ‘Yeah, but did you put the window coverings up?’”
Much of their relationship — which began in August 2023 when they met on The Golden Bachelor and ended in April 2024, when they filed for divorce after three months of marriage — was unhealthy, Nist said.
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Reading Golden Years has made Nist “extremely upset,” she said, and she feels like she has no choice but to address his accusations despite “never” planning to speak about the relationship again.
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“I didn’t want to be saying any of these things, I just felt forced,” she admitted, later adding: “It was really a matter of, if you have nothing good to say just don’t say anything. I didn’t want to hurt him. I never want to hurt another human being. I didn’t want to make anything bad for him, and I didn’t want to make it bad in case he wanted to find someone else.”
“But really, the thing that was nagging me the most were his daughters,” she revealed. “I loved his daughters. I love them. We don’t really talk now, but Jenny and Angie, and his granddaughters, Payton and Charlie, they’re really lovely people, and I didn’t want them to hear anything bad about their dad or their grandfather being said, and so I just left it the way it was. But now, I mean, he’s written a book and he said things, and now I can’t ignore it.”
Golden Years: What I’ve Learned from Love, Loss, and Reality TV by Gerry Turner is available now wherever books are sold.
