What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Susie Evans shared new details of how she and Clayton Echard navigated recent allegations that he was unfaithful.
“I’m a [wedding] videographer. I was in California working and I just finished filming the ceremony of a wedding and I get all these tags and notifications to my phone,” the 29-year-old Virginia Beach native began on the “Talking It Out” podcast on Thursday, April 14. “I open a couple and I see this video and everyone’s, like, speculating, ‘Oh, it’s Clayton and Susie.’ And there’s a TikToker who made a video saying … the most recent Bachelor who’s with his girl still, she hooked up with him the night before. And she’s like, ‘I feel so bad for the girl.’”
Sasha Narang was the woman who went viral for making allegations about hooking up with a Bachelor star on April 8. While Evans told hosts Mike Johnson and Bryan Abasolo that she didn’t doubt Echard, 28, she went to Narang’s profile after the TikToker alleged that she messaged the “fiancée” of the person she spent the night with.
“I clicked my messages and I’ve got a message from her. And I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, like, there is no way.’ Of course, in that moment, my stomach, like, dropped because I was just like, ‘What?’” she explained. “I just couldn’t have even, like, fathomed Clayton of all people — like, I just genuinely have so much trust in him as a good human being before anything else. And then I see a text from him. And he’s like, ‘Oh, my gosh, there’s people speculating online, like, this is crazy.’ And we FaceTime immediately. … He’s in his brother’s apartment in Arizona. This is, like, the day after supposedly that she was with him.”
On Saturday, April 9, Echard was quick to shoot down the allegations via Instagram Stories, citing evidence of his location at an Arizona gym the night prior. While Narang initially doubled down and claimed she had proof, she apologized on Sunday, April 10, after reviewing security footage.
“I want to start by saying I am so sorry to Susie and Clayton. I was genuinely under the impression that I was with him,” she said. “I truly thought that I was with him. Everything I said in that video was clearly a little impulsive. And I shouldn’t have been so assertive and just assumed it was the truth without investigating, maybe, further. And that’s totally on me. And I totally went wrong there. I shouldn’t have dealt with that how I did. But again, I was so under that impression that I thought I was doing the right thing. And I also want to emphasize the whole reason I made the video was not with any malicious intent. I asked myself if I were in [Susie’s] position would I want to know, and I thought she was engaged to him. If I were her, I would have wanted to know that my, you know, future husband is cheating on me with 22-year-olds in bars.”
During Evans’ interview on Thursday, Echard joined and revealed he advised the TikToker to apologize.
“While I wanted to, like, bury her in one aspect, I was like, ‘You know what, she’s still a human being and she still is, like, now under fire.’ And Susie and I talked about, like, ‘We don’t want this girl to do anything extreme,’” the former Bachelor said. “So I just messaged her, I said, ‘Delete your videos, and put out an apology, like, that’s the best thing you can do.’ And she did that. … I don’t want to question whether or not it was genuine. … She took down the videos and moved on from it. And so I want to give her grace.”
Scroll through for more from Evans and Echard: