Here’s what happened, in a (coco)nut shell: Chad—nickname: “Meat Chad,” the villain of JoJo’s season—came to Paradise with a stated objective of, as per the show’s framing, maybe “finding love.” And for a moment it looked like he might have found it. Chad and Lace, the villain of Ben’s season (the lady best known for her unfortunate, repeated insistence that “I’m not crazy”), hit it off immediately. They flirted. They drank. They power-struggled. They seemed to feed off of each other’s wackiness. They fought, playfully. They made up. They made out. They got really friendly with the wall of an infinity pool.
“You know how rats will have a lot of sex and then, like, eat each other?” one contestant said, observing the pair’s singular mating rituals. It was, for a moment, reality-show perfection.
But then things—jarringly—took a turn. Suddenly, Lace was telling Chad to get away from her. He ignored her, seeming to treat the request as a joke. She persisted: “No, I mean it.” And, at that point, all talk of joking disappeared. Chad called Lace a bitch. Joining the group, he made fun of another contestant’s physical disability. He called that woman a bitch, too. He also, summoning his MO from The Bachelorette, threatened violence against several cast members. It was a threat that, made in mixed company rather than toward several similarly beefy men, effectively transformed Chad from villain to menace. “Chad’s talking about murder, rape, killing,” Daniel, Chad’s friend from JoJo’s season, said, seeming genuinely shocked at the turn things had taken.
“If this continues,” Carly, one of the other contestants, said, “it’s gonna get so messy.” This, it turns out, was an understatement. “At one point I was scared for multiple people,” Amanda, from Ben’s season, said.
Many of the other women on the show came together to decry Chad’s behavior—to the camera, and ostensibly to the show’s audience. “Every time Chad’s around, it just makes me nervous,” Carly confessed, “because that’s actually scary and abusive and weird behavior that shouldn’t be happening.”
“I didn’t come to Paradise to be surrounded by drunk, aggressive, abusive jerks,” Sarah, from Sean’s season—the woman he had called a “one-armed bitch”—told Chad.
And then:
“The way you’re talking about women is so disrespectful. I want nothing to do with it. Nothing.”
“To let Chad stay on the show and talk about women the way he does—I just can’t.”
“Chad’s behavior here doesn’t belong.”
Daniel, Chad’s friend, tried to warn him about the mutiny among his fellow cast members, particularly the women. “People are really scared right now,” Daniel told him.
Chad responded to this by accusing his friend of being insufficiently “murdery.”
Chad passed out, drunkenly, soon after that exchange, and that seemed to be the end of things. The next morning, though, Chris summoned the cast—to the “Rose Palapa,” natch—to make an announcement: Chad would be leaving Paradise.