NEED TO KNOW
\nGerry Turner and Theresa Nist got engaged at the end of the inaugural season of The Golden Bachelor in November 2023The couple announced that they were divorcing in April 2024 \u2014 three months after they had tied the knot in a televised ceremonyIn November 2025, Turner released a memoir detailing the “red flags” in their relationship, which Nist has disputed<\/p>\n
Gerry Turner<\/a> laid it all out in his memoir \u2014\u00a0but his ex-wife, Theresa Nist<\/a>, has a story of her own.\n<\/p>\n The former couple met on ABC’s first-ever season of The Golden Bachelor<\/a> and got engaged during the finale in November 2023. Several months later, they got married<\/a> in a televised wedding ceremony on Jan. 4, 2024. Sadly, the reality TV couple’s union only lasted three months, and they announced their divorce<\/a> in April 2024.\n<\/p>\n “Theresa and I have had a number of heart-to-heart conversations, and we’ve looked closely at our situation, our living situation and so forth, and we’ve kind of come to the conclusion mutually that it’s probably time for us to dissolve our marriage,”\u00a0Turner said during an April 2024 interview with Good Morning America<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n Nist added that they had looked at multiple homes but “never got to the point” of landing on one.\n<\/p>\n They both maintained that they still had love for each other and were “best friends.” Turner got engaged just 15 months later to Lana Sutton<\/a> in October 2025.\n<\/p>\n The next month, he opened up more about his and Nist’s brief marriage in his book Golden Years: What I\u2019ve Learned from Love, Loss, and Reality TV<\/a>, claiming that he had doubts before their wedding and that a lack of intimacy led to their divorce.\n<\/p>\n Since its release, his ex-wife has spoken out against his claims, saying during a November 2025 interview on the\u00a0Dear Shandy<\/a>\u00a0podcast that “not one of the stories” she read “is the way it happened.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Here’s everything to know about Golden Bachelor exes Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist’s feud and what they’ve said about each other.<\/p>\n Turner wrote that he fell for Nist in the fantasy suite\u00a0 <\/p>\n Theresa Nist and Gerry Turner celebrate the official launch of Hulu on Disney+ in Los Angeles, California.<\/p>\n Eric McCandless\/Disney via Getty\u00a0<\/p>\n In his memoir, Turner shed more light on why he chose Nist over\u00a0Golden Bachelor\u00a0runner-up,\u00a0Leslie Fhima<\/a>. The former restaurateur wrote that everything changed during their night in the fantasy suite and that he was introduced to a side of Nist that he had “not met before<\/a>.”<\/p>\n “Theresa reinforced her willingness to change her life for love,” Turner penned, noting that she was open to relocating to South Carolina, where he also hoped to live. “Surprisingly, I learned that she was pissed about the horseback ride date and ‘sick and tired’ of being classified as ‘not willing to be adventurous.’ ”\n<\/p>\n He concluded, “In the fantasy suite, she showed me a side that was not for the rest of the world but for me alone.”<\/p>\n Turner said he had \u201csome doubts\u201d before their wedding\u00a0 <\/p>\n Theresa Nist and Gerry Turner.<\/p>\n John & Joseph Photography\/Disney via Getty<\/p>\n The former Golden Bachelor admitted that he had “cold feet<\/a>” leading up to their wedding, but not enough to call the whole thing off.\n<\/p>\n “I think it’s normal to have doubts towards the end and towards that moment when the commitment is engaged,” Turner told E! News<\/a> in November 2025. “So, yeah, I had some doubts, but those doubts didn’t extend to the level of saying I want to call it off.\u201d\n<\/p>\n He added that because he and Nist had previously been in long-term marriages, they felt like they were going to “find a way to make it happen.” However, looking back now, the reality star said he does wish he “would have seen those red flags at the time.”<\/p>\n Turner claimed Nist made him sleep on the sofa\u00a0 <\/p>\n Gerry Turner in January 2025 ; Theresa Nist in March 2025.<\/p>\n Gerry Turner\/Instagram ; Theresa Nist\/Instagram<\/p>\n One of those red flags in question was a lack of intimacy, which Turner claimed faded after they got married. In his memoir, he wrote that when he visited her New Jersey home five days after their wedding, Nist asked him to sleep on the couch<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n \u201cMy first night at her house, she took out sheets and pillows before telling me, \u2018Tomorrow\u2019s a big workday. I need a good night\u2019s sleep. Do you mind sleeping on the sofa?\u2019 \u201d he wrote in an excerpt published by Entertainment Weekly<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n Turner alleged that he continued to sleep on the couch and, eventually, the arrangement made him “a little bitter.”\n<\/p>\n In her interview with Dear Shandy, Nist claimed that they shared her full-sized bed the first night of that trip and that Turner offered<\/a> to sleep on the couch after she had a bad night’s sleep.\n<\/p>\n “I did not ask him to sleep on the couch,” she recalled. “And I said, \u2018Oh, Gerry, would you?\u2019 I said, \u2018I would appreciate it so much.\u2019 Because I knew I was never going to get another bit of sleep the whole time he was there.\u201d\n<\/p>\n The reality star also said that she ordered a king-sized mattress to make sleeping with Gerry more comfortable, but he “never came back.”<\/p>\n Turner said Nist didn\u2019t check in on him after his cancer diagnosis\u00a0 <\/p>\n Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist.<\/p>\n Frank Micelotta\/Disney via Getty<\/p>\n In December 2024, Turner announced that he had been diagnosed with a slow-growing bone marrow cancer<\/a> called Waldenstr\u00f6m’s macroglobulinemia. He claimed in his book that he had told Nist about the news in April 2024 and that she didn’t follow up<\/a> afterwards.\n<\/p>\n “I do remember that she never called to see what was going on or how I was doing.\u201d Turner wrote, adding that other Golden Bachelor contestants had frequently checked in. \u201cI didn\u2019t have any great expectations for Theresa or any of the other women when I shared what was going on with me, but to be that insignificant to someone I had married, albeit briefly, was very painful.”\n<\/p>\n When addressing that claim in her Dear Shandy interview, Nist said that Turner’s timeline was inaccurate and that he had made the diagnosis “sound like it was nothing.”\n<\/p>\n “I knew about this a long time ago,” she stated. “And he presented it to me this way: \u2018My doctor told me that I’m going to die of old age before this cancer will get to me.\u2019 He made it sound like it was nothing, and so far he hasn’t had any symptoms. So it wasn’t as dire as he’s making this out.\u201d\n<\/p>\n The reality star added that she “wasn’t trying to be mean” and “was in the mode of trying to remove” herself from Turner.\n<\/p>\n Nist said that \u201cnot one\u201d of Turner\u2019s claims in his memoir were true <\/p>\n Gerry Turner in July 2025 ; Theresa Nist in September 2023.<\/p>\n Gerry Turner\/Instagram ; Theresa Nist\/Instagram<\/p>\n Though she had no plans to speak about their public relationship again, Nist said she “felt forced” to after reading Golden Years. Turner’s memoir made her “extremely upset” as she felt that not a single story he wrote was as it really happened.\n<\/p>\n “It was really a matter of, if you have nothing good to say, just don’t say anything. I didn’t want to hurt him,” Nist said on the Dear Shandy podcast, adding that she wanted to protect his daughters and granddaughters from hearing “anything bad” about Turner.\n<\/p>\n “So I just left it the way it was,” the reality star said. “But now, I mean, he’s written a book and he said things, and now I can’t ignore it.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Nist said Turner \u201cshould have called off the wedding\u201d <\/p>\n Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist.<\/p>\n John & Joseph Photography\/Disney via Getty<\/p>\n After reading how Turner struggled to choose between her and Fhima, Nist said on the Dear Shandy podcast that one thing was clear: he should have never gone through with their wedding.\n<\/p>\n “You did me no favors by marrying a woman that you did not want to marry,\u201d she said, \u201cYou should not. You should have called off the wedding. No matter that we were on TV, that didn’t matter. This was our lives. You should have stopped it.”\n<\/p>\n The reality star added that she would have been “so happy” and supportive if Turner had chosen Fhima.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEED TO KNOW Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist got engaged at the end of the inaugural season of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267376,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":["post-267375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}