Love Is Blind Creator Explains Show's Vetting Process
Love Is Blind has come under fire over the years as participants’ controversial backgrounds have been discovered, with fans questioning the show’s vetting process. Show creator Chris Coelen revealed they do a series of checks, but not everything can be discovered.
“We have a very rigid vetting process. We have background checks and psychological evaluations,” Chris, 56, told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published on Thursday, October 31, one day after the season 7 reunion episode aired.
“Everyone in the world has a story and we aren’t the police. We don’t regulate or monitor their conversations whether they’re being filmed or not, by the way,” he continued about the contestants.
“We’re not dictating to them what they should talk about, what they shouldn’t talk about. If someone has children or doesn’t have children, that doesn’t preclude them from participating in the process. If someone has a bad relationship with their mother or someone’s had a certain sexual experience in the past or someone is in debt, all those things are very common for the vast majority of people,” Chris explained.
One participant he seemed to be referencing was Tyler Francis. He fathered three children but didn’t tell fiancée Ashley Adionser about it until the season’s 9th episode.
Tyler, 35, told Ashley, 32, he was a “sperm donor” to a couple he knew. But a TikTok user posted a video on October 7 while the season was airing on Netflix, claiming the marketing director “scrubbed’ his 7-year-old son and twin 5-year-old daughters “from his Instagram entirely when he found out he was gonna be on the show.” The blogger added that Tyler was still “very active in their lives.”
The children’s mother, Bri Thomas, broke her silence several days later, saying in a since-deleted Instagram post, “‘Sperm babies’ they are not.”
A few hours later she shared another post featuring a video filmed around Christmas 2022, where a little boy’s voice could be heard calling Tyler “dad.”
“My children love their ‘Dad.’ To think that he has reduced them to ‘sperm babies,’ when I was told he was going on the show to be able to better provide for them, is the most absurd and hurtful thing ever. My kids don’t deserve this,” Bri continued.
She later explained Tyler donated sperm when she was married to her ex-wife, Daeshon, that resulted in their son. The other children came from “natural unplanned intercourse with absolutely no complexity surrounding parentage.”
“Everyone has stuff. Everyone’s lived life, and our job is not to make sure that everyone talks about everything,” Chris explained about the show’s participants.
“It’s not our obligation to report to everyone everything that you might find interesting. That’s not really our place, because our job is to document that,” he added.
Chris stated that the show doesn’t film contestants 24/7, noting it was “important” to stress that.
“For them to really get the full picture of who one another is before they get to the altar and make a decision,” he explained. “So, we try to help them have all kinds of experiences. There’s no way for me to sit here and say I know what people talk about off camera.”