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‘The Bachelor’ Loses Its Cold, Black Heart

An HR investigation led to the departure of ‘The Bachelor’ franchise creator Mike Fleiss.
An HR investigation led to the departure of ‘The Bachelor’ franchise creator Mike Fleiss. Photo: Steven Lawton/FilmMagic
Matthew Belloni
March 30, 2023

A round of applause on the Warner Bros. lot is probably in order for Samantha Mirabello. She’s the Warners attorney and investigator who, I’m told, looked into Bachelor franchise creator Mike Fleiss’s behavior after several staffers complained about racially discriminatory casting and emotional bullying. The results of Mirabello’s probe led Warners and Disney to finally push Fleiss out this week after 21 years as a notorious figure in the unscripted television community.

I won’t summarize Fleiss’s well-known Bachelor scandals—resisting diverse contestants; that civil rights complaint claiming outright race bias; allegedly beating his pregnant wife (he denied it); waging a war on his Malibu neighbor David Charvet that included “loud barking sounds emanating from loudspeakers in the wee hours of the morning.” Behind the scenes, Fleiss has always been a consensus first-round pick for Reality TV’s All-Asshole team, not to mention a classic right-place right-time guy.