Joan Vassos Disney/Ramona Rosales
Joan Vassos’ DMs got so wild after appearing on The Golden Bachelor that her kids had to step in.
“[With DMs], they’re just total strangers messaging you. I didn’t really respond to those much. Or I would have little conversations and say, ‘Thank you, you’re so flattering,’ or whatever,” the Golden Bachelorette, 61, said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly published on Wednesday, August 14.” But none of them seemed to be anything that would really work out.”
Joan added that some of the messages she received “were weird.”
“I got d–k pics,” she revealed. “And I got people with foot fetishes. They wanted me to send them pictures of my feet and would pay me for it. One person offered to buy all the shoes that I wore on Golden Bachelor. It was scary.”
When the requests continued to get strange, Joan’s children decided to help their mom by filtering out the messages.
“My kids were like, ‘Give me your phone, mom. We’re blocking all this,’” she said.
Joan, who shares four children with late husband John Vassos, confessed that she had a “hard time navigating” her dating life after appearing on the ABC dating series. She even tried out dating apps, which she appreciated were “kind of vetted” unlike the wild world of social media.
Bachelor fans were introduced to Joan last year as she was one of the many contestants pursuing Gerry Turner. While Joan scored a one-on-one date with Gerry, 72, she ultimately left the show to support her daughter, who had just given birth.
Despite her early exit, Joan was crowned the next lead of the spinoff.
“There’s a lot of knowledge that we have inside of us because we’ve lived life,” Joan told CNN after her casting was announced. “In our culture, I feel like growing old is not a dignified thing. You’re just supposed to kind of fade in the back, take a backseat to the next generation. I’m hoping that we change that a little bit. We’re still fun and energetic and we know how to use our phones.”
Before taking off on her journey to find love, she got some words of wisdom from her now “good friend” Gerry.
“He exemplified somebody who is very open and vulnerable. He said that’s what you need to be from day one because you don’t have a lot of time,” she said in a June interview with Entertainment Tonight. “This is a quick journey. You can’t leave anything on the table. I feel like day one, starting conversation one, everything you do here is important.”
Earlier this week, ABC released a sneak peek of Joan’s suitors. Bachelor Nation quickly pointed out that alum Kelsey Anderson’s dad, Mark Anderson, was one of the men in the running. (Kelsey, 26, is currently engaged to The Bachelor season 28 lead Joey Graziadei.)
“Welllllll, would you look at that,” Kelsey wrote via her Instagram Story on Tuesday alongside a photo of her dad from the announcement.
The Golden Bachelorette is set to premiere on ABC Wednesday, September 18.