‘Bachelor in Paradise’ star explains post-show breakup — and why she’s leaving Charlotte

You’ll have to forgive Kylee Russell if she’s been hard to catch up with over the past month and a half or so.

For a good portion of December and January, Russell — who gained reality-TV fame in 2023 on ABC’s “The Bachelor” and then spin-off show “Bachelor in Paradise” — has been getting ready to uproot her entire life and move to San Diego for a fresh start, after spending the first 26 years of it in the Charlotte area. So, needless to say, things have been “a little bit crazy on my end,” she admits.

But even more so, the alumna of Lake Norman Charter School and Wingate University desperately needed some time to decompress. And to heal herself, emotionally.

To recap her transformation from postpartum nurse at Atrium Health Cabarrus hospital in Concord into nurse-slash-reality-TV star:

• In the fall of 2022, Russell joined 29 other women vying for the affection of Zach Shallcross on the 27th season of “The Bachelor” (which aired from January to March 2023); became the center of a conversation about microaggressions toward Black women; and eventually left in tears after being rejected by Shallcross.

• At some point, Aven Jones — runner-up of the 2022 season of “The Bachelorette” — began liking Russell’s social-media posts; she would go on to reveal that she’d had a crush on him since before that started; however, they’d never met or even communicated prior to meeting during production of “Bachelor in Paradise” in Mexico last June.

• They hit it off; and despite some tension (due to Russell’s desire for Jones to propose before the end of filming and Jones’s reluctance to do so), they ultimately left the beach as a couple.

• For more than five months, including throughout “Bachelor in Paradise’s” September-to-December run, Russell and Jones continued dating; but just two days after the season finale ended on Dec. 7 — and one day after they announced publicly that they were still together — Russell posted on Instagram that they had split “due to multiple infidelities.”

Then, for several weeks, she tried her best to lay low.

“I did a little bit of a social media hiatus,” she says, “as well as I went on family vacation right after that, out of the country.”

“It was like my heart was ripped out of my chest,” Russell explains of the post-finale revelation. “I think what hurt the most is how blindsided I was. Cheating — I mean, that in of itself is just a hard topic. It’s something hard to go through. ... I’ve never been in a relationship where I’ve been cheated on before, so this was all new territory to me — as well as it being so public. It was just a hard concept to grasp, because literally up until that moment when I found out, I had planned my whole life around this relationship. I had planned a move to San Diego. I really, truly saw my future and was making future plans with this person.”

But she is indeed still moving to San Diego (more on that in a minute). Tuesday, in fact, marks her last day on the job at the hospital.

And after more than six weeks of relative silence, Russell has started opening up about how she came to discover that Jones was being unfaithful to her. In her own words, here’s a synopsis of their relationship from beginning to end, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Kylee Russell on her relationship with Aven Jones

I was really excited about going to “Paradise.”

A lot of people had this misconception that Aven and I talked prior. But the extent of our friendship — or whatever you want to call it — prior to “Paradise” was strictly him liking some Instagram pictures, us then following each other, and then him sending the infamous fire emoji. And all I did back to that was, like, a little heart. That was the extent of our interaction before. I almost wish we would have had more interaction, because I would have been less nervous waiting for him and those first interactions.

The second day, when he arrived, I will say I was a little scared going into it, because I was like, This is either gonna meet every expectation that I have — or it’s all gonna crumble and burn, and then I’m gonna have to completely reconfigure my mindset and figure out how I want to go about “Paradise,” and who I want to go about that with.

But literally from our first date, I would consider us to be one of the strongest couples there. We’re very similar as people. We have a lot of the same interests. All of the puzzle pieces were coming together.

I will say our last couple of days there became really hard. From watching the show and seeing how we were portrayed, it looked a lot like I was just wanting the Neil Lane diamond and the fantasy TV engagement so badly. And although that is glamorous and would have been amazing, I really just wanted a commitment from Aven. By him not choosing to propose, it kind of seemed as if he was one foot out of the door, and that worried me. Especially when we were going to go back to real life and be, you know, thousands of miles apart.

But at the end of the day, I knew how strong we were. I knew that I was falling in love with him. So I didn’t want to sacrifice that aspect of our relationship simply because he wouldn’t get engaged to me. Our relationship was more important to me than that, and so that’s why I chose to leave with him just as boyfriend and girlfriend.

After “Paradise,” I was in Charlotte, he was in San Diego. I obviously wanted to move. But a move across the country is not something you can do overnight. I was planning on — and am, still — moving with (fellow “Bachelor” cast members/close friends) Jess (Girod) and Mercedes (Northup), and they had to find jobs. I had to find a job. It took us months before we were finally ready to rip the Band-Aid off and go. So, Aven and I had done six months of long distance, which I felt we did a really good job at. We saw each other at least once a month, if not more; and those times together, we were with each other for seven days or longer. He met my family multiple times. We were really happy.

I will say once the show started airing, obviously, we saw things said on both of our ends that we forgot, or some situations were portrayed a little bit differently than I remembered. So there were some arguments. Some bickering. Some normal relationship things. But nothing crazy.

By November, about a month prior to the ending of “Paradise,” our relationship had grown so strong. We had officially told each other that we loved each other. We were talking about future plans — engagement, marriage, and how many kids we were wanting. Life was so good. I had recently accepted a job in San Diego, so he knew that me moving was actually gonna become a reality and wasn’t just something that we were talking about. Despite the little arguments we had while we were watching the show, I thought once the show was over with, we’d be good.

We even had a photographer in Charlotte come, a couple of weeks prior to the finale, and take some couples photos for us. They were actually the photos we posted the day after the finale. It was something we wanted to use to let everyone know that despite our non-fairytale ending on the show, we were still together and going really strong.

After posting, I was so excited, because we got a lot of positive feedback from the fan base. Everyone just seemed so excited about us. Which made me even more excited. It was just really reassuring. Then about an hour after making the post, there was someone in my direct messages basically saying that Aven had been unfaithful to me back in July, when he was on a vacation in Santa Monica.

Obviously, this was a big claim. So I went back and forth with the girl, asking specific details, and then looking back at my text messages with Aven, to make sure everything she was saying aligned with what he had told me he had done that night. And unfortunately, it did. I was so blindsided. But still, no inkling in my body made me think Aven would ever cheat on me. Even though this girl had so many details, I didn’t want to believe it was true. So I asked her if she had any actual, full-blown proof. Then she ended up sending me a photo of Aven and the girl the next morning.

I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. I broke down, had some panic attacks, called him. He immediately owned up to it. He didn’t try to make it seem like it was something it wasn’t. I mean, he really couldn’t lie about it, because I had the proof. But I’ve never loved someone that hard or that strong, so it was really hard for me to be like, “OK, after six months, this is over.”

In my mind, I was making up excuses. Like, It was only in July. We had just gotten back from “Paradise.” If we were in a real relationship, we probably wouldn’t have even, you know, been dating at that point. We most likely would have still just been talking and seeing other people. I was just going back and forth with ways of how we could get past this. Obviously, I can’t take him back right away. It’s something that we’re gonna have to work through. But in my heart, I felt as though we could eventually get back together and work through it. I tried giving him the benefit of the doubt. I toyed with that all night. That was a Friday night.

Saturday morning, I was talking to him about how to handle the fact that he was supposed to go to the Dominican Republic with my family and me that upcoming Wednesday. Trying to decipher how to go about it, because I didn’t necessarily want to tell all of my family about what I’d learned. I didn’t want them to have any hatred in their heart for him, in case one day we would get back together. So I was just kind of explaining this to him, asking his opinion on what he thought we should do. And I think I sounded as though I was gonna take him back. So that’s when he decided to be fully transparent with me.

He owned up to the fact that — when he went back to Boston, both in August and September, for two different weddings — he had been unfaithful to me with a childhood friend there. That’s when I think I felt the most broken. Because the July thing was one thing. I was figuring out ways to see if I could get over that. But him telling me about the other, in that moment, I knew: OK, this is done. This is over with. I felt like my feet were swept up out from under me, because like I said, I had planned my whole entire future with this man, and here I was, in a blink of an eye, trying to figure out how I was gonna reconfigure my life and start a new future — without him.

On top of having to deal with all of this newfound information, some of the girls who had shared the information with me were threatening to leak the picture and the text messages to the blogs. So I just was like, OK, I need to get ahead of this, because I don’t want to look dumb. I want this to be my story, and I want to be able to tell it before someone takes it upon themselves to tell it for me.

It was really hard to make that post — because I knew once that post was made, the public would know, and the chances of Aven and I ever getting back together would become really slim, just because of the backlash of what something like that would be to the public.

But for my own peace, and to help me move forward, I decided to make that Instagram post.

Would she go back on ‘The Bachelor’ a third time?

Russell heads west in about a week and a half, and she says she actually feels better about the move now than she did when she was planning to make it to be in the same city as Jones.

“I love Charlotte,” she says. “I’m so close to my family. I’m 10 minutes away from my parents. If I’m not at work, I’m over there. I barely even stayed in my apartment. So when Aven and I were together, the thought of moving to San Diego was really hard for me, just because it seemed very permanent. Aven just started a new job there. He’s developed a life for himself there, and he loves it. So he doesn’t really see himself moving. And that was something I was potentially sacrificing. I was like, OK, if I move there with him, this could be a long-term thing before we get back to Charlotte. I could be here for 10-plus years. That terrified me.

“When we broke up, I was like, OK, I don’t have to make this move now. But I think for myself and for my own personal growth, it’s something that I for sure want to do. I feel like right now in my life, I’m at a stagnant place in Charlotte. I really just, like, go to work, come home and hang out with my family. Also, a lot of my friends from the show are moving there, or have already moved there.

“So I think it’s a good place to be to get me out of my comfort zone. To be able to really just live and enjoy life with friends — and now that I’m just going for myself, it doesn’t feel as permanent. If I go and I commit myself for a year, I don’t necessarily love it, and I want to come back to Charlotte, I can. Or if I get down there and I absolutely love it, then if I want to stay for 10-plus years, I can. But it feels more so on my own terms, rather than having to feel bound by a relationship.”

The job Russell mentioned that she’s accepted in San Diego is as an aesthetic nurse at a medspa. She wasn’t able to find a postpartum nursing job in San Diego. But if she ultimately decides to return to Charlotte, she hopes Atrium Health Cabarrus will have her back.

As for whether she’d ever consider a return to “The Bachelor” franchise?

“I never want to say never,” she says, “because I don’t want to one day go back (onto the show) and look like a hypocrite. Right now, personally, in my life, I don’t foresee doing something like that again. But ... if the right opportunity presented itself, or I was just like, you know, what the heck, let’s give it one more try ... it’s something I would be open to.”

She does, after all, still believe in love — and still even believes it can happen on television.

“Because I felt that,” Russell says. “I had never loved someone more than I ever loved Aven. But unfortunately, it ended the way it did. And that’s not necessarily because of the show. It’s just because of someone’s own personality flaw. So I think I do believe in what the show has to offer, and I do believe it works.

“Just with the right person.”