The Gerry Turner whom Theresa Nist described in a new podcast interview is not the same Gerry Turner viewers saw in the first season of ABC’s The Golden Bachelor. Nist, who married and divorced Turner following their connection on the ABC reality show, claimed that Turner once joked about killing her and hiding her body.
Nist recalled that moment in a recent interview on the Dear Shandy podcast. “I finally went to his house, and we took a walk around this lake called Pretty Lake, and we were coming to the end of it, and he said — this is really bizarre — He said, ‘You see that shed up there?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s where I’m going to hide your body after I kill you and chop you up,’ And he wasn’t laughing. I said, ‘Well, if this was his idea of a joke, that was pretty dark humor.’”
Though she didn’t take Turner’s comments seriously, Nist believed they revealed his true feelings about her. “I just felt like there was animosity in that statement that was underlying,” she said. “Like, maybe if he could have gotten rid of me somehow. I don’t think he would have killed me. No, I don’t think that was true. It wasn’t true. It’s not true, but it just spoke to an underlying feeling about me.”
As the second season of The Golden Bachelor airs on ABC, Turner and Nist have been waging a war of words that started when the former released a tell-all book titled Golden Years: What I’ve Learned From Love, Loss, and Reality TV.
In the book, for example, Turner claimed that Nist “ignored opportunities for intimacy” with him after they got engaged on TV. He explained that intimacy for him involves not just sex but cuddling, holding hands in public, sharing thoughts and feelings, and prioritizing one’s partner. “All those intimacies that I really hoped to have again with a woman seemed just out of reach in my relationship with Theresa,” he wrote.
On the Dear Shandy podcast, however, Nist said the situation was “quite the opposite” with Turner.
“I said, ‘Why don’t you ever approach me for physical intimacy?’” she said. “He never did. There was a time I hadn’t seen him in so long, he didn’t even reach out to kiss me. It was a thing that he wasn’t doing. I felt it was quite the opposite [than what he wrote]. By the time he got to my house, I was just done with it. He did try to do something and I said, ‘It’s too little too late. I can’t do this.’”
Turner and Nist got married in a live ABC special in January 2024 and announced their split three months later.
The Golden Bachelor, Season 2, Wednesdays, 9/8c, ABC