Joan Vassos Explains How Her Late Husband Had ‘a Little Hand’ in Her Doing Golden Bachelorette

Joan Vassos has said that her late husband is the reason why decided to do the Golden Bachelorette!

“I feel like he maybe had a little hand in me actually getting here, honestly,” Joan told ET. “He told me right before he passed away, ‘You need to go out and find somebody else. You were the best wife in the world and I want you to be happy.’ He gave me this wonderful gift before he died, and he said go and do something, and so here I am.”

“I had a conversation with a friend of mine and I was like, ‘God, I had the offer to be on it and I’m a little afraid that it is not honoring his memory by doing this. I feel like I’m betraying him in some way,'” she said. “Obviously I’m not, but I had that feeling for some reason.

She said, ‘You are nuts! He would have loved this.'”

Joan was married to her husband, John Vassos, for 32 loving years until his tragic passing from pancreatic cancer in 2021.

“He was the husband that always made me feel safe and cherished,” she wrote on Instagram in January. “He was the parent that was always the fun one because that’s all he knew how to do…lucky kids because fun in his book was generally epic. I could go on for hours.”

“He loved reality TV. He was a dive in with both feet to anything you do kind of person,” she said. “I think he’s up there going, ‘Look, that’s my wife down there. She’s doing this.'” 

How did she find out she was going to be the first lead of the Golden Bachelorette?

“Jesse Palmer, who I love and have gotten to know, Zoomed me. I thought, ‘Huh, isn’t that weird that Jesse’s Zooming me. I thought I was having a meeting with the producer,'” she recalled. “It was Jesse and I’m like, ‘OK, something’s going on here.’ And then he told me, ‘I hope you have some time this summer, because you are the first ever Golden Bachelorette.’ It was crazy. I screamed, of course.”

“I didn’t have to think about it for one second, because I thought about it long before when they first said that they were considering me. I had a long time to think about it,” she said. “I even talked to my family about it to make sure that they were OK with it, because I went from being one of a lot of people to being the one. This is a little scarier for them too, it puts us all in a much bigger public spotlight, and they were all wonderful about it. They wanted me to do it.”