“I had to suffer through a lot of innuendo and half-truths,” says Gerry Turner, star of The Golden Bachelor, who led the inaugural season of the spin-off dating series in 2023. “I spent months and months being quiet about it.” But now he’s sharing his side of the story in a new memoir, Golden Years: What I’ve Learned from Love, Loss, and Reality. “When someone else tells your truth and that becomes the headline,” as he explains to Vanity Fair, “there’s no getting that back.”
In the tell-all, Turner gets candid about the circumstances surrounding his split from Theresa Nist, whom he married in a televised wedding on ABC in January 2024. The couple separated after only three months of marriage, the shortest in Bachelor-franchise history. Amid fallout from their breakup, Turner writes about eleventh-hour prenup negotiations, a case of cold feet the night before his on-camera nuptials, and the suicidal ideation he experienced after the divorce. “I just wanted things to shut off,” he says now. “I didn’t want to be in the spotlight in such a negative way, so that was my internal desire to become a non-person momentarily.”
These steely words feel eons away from the warm glow of Turner’s season in the fall of 2023, when the retired restaurateur, father, and grandfather, living in an Indiana lake house, was tapped to become the Bachelor franchise’s first senior lead. Before being plucked out of obscurity to find love on TV, Turner was married for 43 years to his high school sweetheart, Toni, who died in 2017. His second chance at love reinvigorated the sometimes stale reality TV dating enterprise by swapping 20-something influencers for suitors over 60. The series premiere was the most-watched debut for any Bachelor franchise since 2021 and the most-watched of any premiere of ABC’s on its streaming partner, Hulu.
As his memoir debuts, Turner reflects on his whirlwind few years in the spotlight and the fallout from his short-lived reality-TV marriage. Although he doesn’t want to “air out dirty laundry,” the 74-year-old can’t resist a few jabs: “I would like to send her a thank you card because the more she talks about it, the more books that are going to be sold. So, she’s making me money.”
In the book, Turner takes issue with nearly everything about his final rose recipient—from Nist’s “East Coast mentality” (she’s from New Jersey) to what she’d have for breakfast. The 72-year-old, who still works as a financial services professional, isn’t eager to dredge up old wounds—but she didn’t mince words when reached for comment about Turner’s book. “None of what Gerry Turner has said in his disparaging remarks about me is true, and none of the interactions we had are stated in the way that they actually happened. It is fiction,” Nist said in a statement exclusive to Vanity Fair. “I am very sad to think that this man had to resort to putting me down in order to try to make himself look better.”
