The first promo at the end of The Bachelorette's season premiere always promises the biggest fights to come, usually with medics from a totally different incident cleverly edited in. And the end of Rachel Lindsay's first rose ceremony was no exception. In her season's sneak peek, we see Kenny the wrestler with a bloody eye, but what happens to Kenny on The Bachelorette? All we know for sure is that he gets hurt.
As tension builds in the promo, we hear Adam saying to Rachel in a private conversation, "Someone's going to fight. Like, blood's going to be shed."
The next thing that's heard is a disembodied voice screaming, "Do you want a piece of me?" as the camera pans back on a long, chaotic-looking shot. Someone is charging at someone else, a bunch of guys are trying to hold the people fighting back, and it even looks like some of the production crew might get caught in the fracas. Finally, we see Kenny with a very swollen left eye and blood dripping down his face. It seems pretty clear that he got punched, though we obviously don't see the hit.
Rachel says in a cutaway interview, "I don't think this was fair to him and I don't know what I'm going to do," though we don't know if that interview is tied to the Kenny situation, either.
It's interesting to see Kenny as a potential victim of violence on the show, given that he's a professional wrestler. Like, he probably has some basic self-defense skills in his back pocket. But! He's also one of the older, more relaxed guys in the group at 35 years old and a dad to a 10-year-old daughter. It makes me think that he may have held back from engaging with an aggressive dude on purpose. I wonder if he took the hit, rather than getting into a brawl on national television and embarrassing his kid or setting a harmful example for her.
Another curious piece of the promo is a cutaway interview with Rachel that plays right after this sequence, but it's obvious from her dress that it was filmed on the first night. She says, cryptically:
It's just not fair. I get pressured from so many different ways being in this position and I don't — I did not want to get into all of this tonight, and I already know what people are going to say about me, and judge me for the decisions that I'm making.
We didn't see what that was in reference to, but if she's already doubting her image on night one, it may point to a season-long internal struggle that mirrors Nick's from last season. Hopefully, Kenny makes a full recovery and his assailant, if he exists, faces consequences for his violent outburst.
