Portlander Juelia Kinney Is on Bachelor in Paradise for All the Right Reasons

It's hard not to really, really like Juelia Kinney, the Beaverton native and current center of the drama unfolding on Bachelor in Paradise, the obscenely watchable Bachelor franchise spinoff, airing now on ABC for three hours a week, Sundays and Mondays at 8 pm.

Bachelor in Paradise, for the uninitiated, is a show that brings people who failed to find love on the Bachelor and Bachelorette to “paradise” (Sayulita, a small beach town a couple hours away from Puerto Vallarta) to drink, drink, sunbathe, drink, go on dates with each other and then, while drinking, decide who gets to stay for another week. New cast members are introduced every few days and there’s a rose ceremony every week that involves people who haven’t sufficiently coupled up getting sent, tearful and unsure they will ever find love, to the airport in a minivan. Basically, it’s Survivor meets Bachelor with an open bar. 

Kinney, 31, a petite blonde with penchant for chunky jewelry and bright colors, has been cast as the good girl, the single widowed mom, so sweet and friendly—and, as the rest of the cast keeps insisting, so deserving of love. She comes off on the show as deeply trusting and hopeful, the perfect foil for the villain couple, Samantha, her one-time friend and a dead ringer for Ursula from The Little Mermaid after she becomes human, and Joe, the increasingly disturbed and disturbing Southern boy who tricked Kinney into giving him a rose, and also made a guy named Jonathan cry. 

“It was hard for me on the show and it’s hard for me now,” Kinney says. 

As a skeptical and ironic viewer of the show, I ask her the obvious question: Is any of this actually real? Did they plan this out, storyboard it? Because it seems, like, so staged.

"No," says Kinney, decisively. "I had no idea. I really didn't."

She's either a great actor or totally sincere. And she doesn't pull any punches with Joe. "Joe is just not a good person," she says. "And he can try to apologize now to the media, but I know who he is."

She is similarly still angry with Sam. Before Bachelor in Paradise, they were “very good friends,” who went on two vacations together and “talked almost daily at some points.” 

"I really did think she was my friend," says Kinney. "It makes me scared because I'm like, I was fooled by my friend. I was fooled by this guy. Like, gosh, I need to check out myself! Maybe I'm too trusting."

It's easy to see how she was cast on the show. When I arrive at our interview, she sits alone at a table in a strip-mall Starbucks, typing on her laptop with bright pink nails, prettier and thinner than your average Beavertonian but not outrageously so. When I introduce myself, she shakes my hand enthusiastically. 

Kinney's early life was normal for an Oregon girl: She attended Beaverton High and then went to Oregon State, where she was an Alpha Phi majoring in fashion merchandising and interior design. After college, she moved to San Diego, got married and had a baby. 

And then, as watchers of the show already know, her husband killed himself. She was left alone with their baby, far from her family in Southern California. 

“I’ve never felt so alone in my entire life,” Kinney says. â€œI was so young. And I had this little baby. And I first of all didn’t know any single moms and second, I didn’t know anyone who had lost a spouse. And then I didn’t know anyone who had lost someone to suicide.”

The Bachelor franchise loves tragic tales like this and plays them up as much as possible, but talking to Kinney, her backstory becomes real and I begin to worry my ironic watching of the shows will be affected and worse, I might start to cry while doing an interview.

“I just finally made a decision to choose happiness,” she says. “You can wallow in your sorrows, and I don’t think anyone would have judged me for that but at the end of the day, I’m my daughter’s only parent and she needs to see me smiling.” 

That is when her journey, as they call it in Bachelor-speak, started. Kinney found online dating in San Diego to be miserable and so she applied for the show. She stayed on The Bachelor Season 19 for four episodes, half the season, but didn't really "feel a connection" with Chris Soules (Not a surprise–he was basically an attractive scarecrow posing as a human. She calls him "a really great guy"). But she came back to Bachelor in Paradise because she wants to find love. She believes, really and truly, that that's what these shows are all about.

"I think people are rooting for love and that's why they like the show," she says, though she won't tell me if she herself has found love on the show.

“I can’t say!” she says in a sing-song voice, with a secretive smile. 

It’s difficult for a hardened television cynic like me to believe that, as they always say on the shows, “the process works” or there even are “right reasons.” But it’s clear that Kinney is earnest, and “deserves” love, just like everyone else on the planet.  

Want to meet Kinney yourself and watch the show with her? She's hosting a live viewing party this Sunday at Henry's 12th Street Tavern in the Pearl. If you go, bring your cutest, nicest, singlest male friends and introduce them to her. Make sure they are looking for love though, and that they're there for the right reasons.

WWeek 2015