New details are emerging about the relationship between The Golden Bachelor star Gerry Turner and season 1 winner Theresa Nist, his now ex-wife.
The 74-year-old reality star just released his memoir, Golden Years: What I’ve Learned from Love, Loss, and Reality TV and in it, he recounts some challenging moments from his brief marriage to Theresa.
Entertainment Weekly shared an excerpt earlier this week in which Gerry made several claims about his ex, like that she made all forms of intimacy difficult during their marriage.
He also alleged she made him sleep on the couch during their first night together (and several nights after), wanted him to dress “better” in clothes from Lululemon, amongst other things.
Well, Theresa has since responded to EW‘s request for comment and refuted several statements from Gerry‘s memoir.
Keep reading to find out more…
She starts by saying that they did sleep together on the first night in her “very small bed.”
“I’m not sure if Gerry has a faulty memory or if he just wanted a more dramatic story for his book. Here’s what really happened: We slept together the first night in my very small bed. After my husband passed away, I moved out of the master bedroom into a smaller bedroom with a full-sized bed and I turned the master bedroom into an office,” she wrote.
However, Theresa adds that she hadn’t slept at all that night because she’d been alone for almost a decade and it would take time to get used to sharing her bed again.
“In the morning, Gerry asked me how I slept. I told him that I hadn’t slept at all, and he offered to sleep on the couch going forward. I was extremely grateful and said, ‘I promise you that when you come back, I will have a king-sized bed all set up in the master bedroom for us.’”
After her then-husband returned to Indiana, they pooled some money and Theresa bought a king-sized bed. She and her daughter assembled it and sent Gerry photos of the process.
Theresa wrote, “I was so happy that we now had a wonderful bed to sleep together in, but Gerry never returned. However, two of my great friends from the show, Susan Noles and Peggy Dercole, got to enjoy the bed when they came to visit me this past summer.”
She also added her side to the Lululemon incident: “Regarding the Lululemon story, we were lying on my couch when I received a direct message from someone on Instagram saying how excited she was that Gerry was in town, and that she worked at Lululemon and she would love for us to come visit the store. Gerry agreed. When we got there, Gerry saw a shirt and asked me if I thought he should try it on. I enthusiastically said yes, and we went into the dressing room together. He asked me if I thought he should buy it and I said, ‘Yes, you look great in it!’ And he bought it.”
“He was grateful for my encouragement because he said in the past, he always hesitated to buy things that he knew he should have. As for the shirt he was wearing before dinner, that was an entirely separate occasion where I gently suggested he wear something different because the restaurant was upscale — something any good wife or partner would do. These were entirely two separate stories that Gerry decided to combine together for effect.”
Gerry and Theresa married during a televised wedding in January 2024 before announcing their split in April. Their divorce was finalized in June 2024.
Golden Years: What I’ve Learned from Love, Loss, and Reality TV was published on November 4.