In July 2019, before he left the show, Lovato had posted footage of Johnson on the Bachelorette to her Instagram Stories, writing in the caption, “Mike I accept your rose.” In the video she could reportedly be heard saying, “Swing me, kiss me! Boo boo.” Just a few days later, he was sent home.
Johnson took to Twitter writing, “Jus saying, my future wife though girl you ready for smiles, adventure, comfort, growth, honesty, laughter, me falling using my inhaler and kissing your stretch marks and imperfections. Where u hiding.”
The two then had some major back-and-forths with likes and comments on Instagram and Twitter before allegedly taking it offline for some IRL dates. In September 2019, Johnson spoke out about the budding relationship. “I’m just getting to know Demi,” he told E! “I think she’s absolutely fantastic, and I don’t want no pressure on her, no pressure on me—we’re just trying to get to know each other. That’s all.” Sadly, by October, the relationship was done.
Back to the present, though—maybe Johnson was flirting with LaPlaca with those comments or maybe this is just his personality. Or, a third option: what if this is all just a setup to have her become the next Bachelorette (after Clare Crawley’s season, of course) and for Johnson to re-join the cast? Either way, we’re in.
UPDATE: March 29, 2020 at 9:30 a.m. ET — Madison Prewett is shutting down rumors that she’s dating former Bachelorette contestant Connor Saeli.
On Friday, March 27, Prewett answered fan questions on an Instagram live session. According to E! News, she denied that she is seeing Saeli when asked directly by a fan. “We are not together. I am not with anyone right now,” she reportedly said. “I am just focusing on myself and taking it one day at a time. So yeah, so there’s that.”
However, the Bachelor alum also took some time to shed light on that “talk” Mike Johnson had mentioned. “[Saeli] seems like a really sweet guy and he, like, reached out right after the finale and just sent some encouragement and some support,” she said. “Really sweet, but that is it.”
ORIGINAL STORY: March 23, 2020—
Look out, Hannah Brown and Tyler Cameron: Connor Saeli and Madison Prewett may be The Bachelor’s next will-they-or-won’t-they couple. In a recent Instagram Live stream with two of Brown’s former contestants, Mike Johnson and Saeli, it became apparent that something is going on with the latter and Peter Weber’s recent ex, Prewett.
Allow me to break it down. The coronavirus outbreak has caused most of Bachelor Nation to flock to social media (even more than usual). Pilot Pete is hosting Q&As, Brown and Cameron are hanging on TikTok, and on Sunday, March 22, Johnson and Saeli chatted about life on Instagram Live. Somehow, between talks of weighted vests and bingeing Don’t F**k With Cats on Netflix, Johnson and Saeli implied multiple times that Saeli may be starting something with Prewett.
It first came up when Saeli began reading the comments (never a good idea). “Connor and Madi, please,” someone had apparently written. Johnson seemed shocked Saeli brought that up.
“I can’t believe you said that, bro,” Johnson responded.
Then, later in the conversation when the two were answering fan questions, someone asked if the two would go on Bachelor in Paradise again. When Saeli seemed hesitant, Johnson decided to get cryptic. “If a certain individual [went], would you go?” he asked.
“Sure, yeah,” Saeli said after a long pause.
Unfortunately for Saeli, Johnson was not done. After Saeli asked Johnson if he was talking to another woman from Weber’s season, Kelley Flanagan, Johnson praised her. Then he threw it back at Saeli.
“You gonna put me on blast, Imma put you on blast,’ Johnson joked. “What’s up with you and Madison, though? You talking to her?”
“I don’t know, we’ll see,” Saeli responded, before adding, “No, dude, I can’t get into anything.”
This is why we all love Mike Johnson, am I right?
Meanwhile, Prewett recently broke up with Weber after a drama-filled season.
“As Peter and I have decided to go our separate ways, I am confident that we will both move in the direction of our purpose and never forget that God has a plan in all things,” she wrote in an Instagram post on March 13. “I will always love and respect him. I am convinced our paths were meant to cross and we are both better because they did.”
Four-time Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Shawn Johnson East—like so many women—has incredibly high expectations of herself. So when the delivery of her daughter Drew Hazel didn’t go as she’d planned, she felt like she’d failed in her first moments of motherhood. “I went in with such a stubborn mindset of thinking the only way I could bring our baby into the world was naturally. No meds no intervention. At 14 hours when I chose to get an epidural, I felt guilty. At 22 hours when we were told I had to get a C-section, I felt like I had failed,” she wrote on Instagram. Here, Johnson East opens up to Glamour about the complicated world of social media moms, wrestling with mom guilt, and what it means to be a strong mother.
As an athlete, I had one mentality: you have to be strong, not weak. I was never one to take pain medication, worried it might affect my performance or somehow make me less of an elite athlete. Fast forward to motherhood, and those same attitudes applied. I muscled through the aches and pains of pregnancy, never wanting to be ‘that complaining pregnant woman,’ and planned to have a natural birth—it was my body against the pain. It was my first real mom decision and I felt like the safest option for my baby was going natural. That’s what I thought it meant to be a strong mother.
Things did not go as planned. Fourteen hours into labor, I asked for an epidural. By 22 hours, I was being taken for a C-section.
It my first wave of mom guilt. I felt like I’d caved, like I was selfish for getting the epidural. I wondered, Am I already making a poor decision for my child? I felt guilty, like I wasn’t doing this for my daughter but as a selfish reaction to the pain. And when doctors told me I’d need a C-section, I felt like this beautiful dream I’d had as a first-time mom to do the best thing for my child had failed. I know that C-sections are relatively safe procedures—safer than delivering vaginally in some cases—but I couldn’t stop thinking, What if something goes wrong because I selfishly decided to do this? I felt like I had failed her already.
There’s so much pressure on moms to be perfect. We tell moms that they have to be perfect otherwise they’re going to scar their child, raise them the wrong way, and leave them with issues that will be all mom’s fault. Sometimes it feels like no matter what decision you make, it’s the wrong one. In the hospital, I had this painful doubt: Am I already doing something wrong for my baby?
People on social media have a lot to say about this. We all know the mommy shamers—I’ve already been asked how dare I not breastfeed—people with such passionate opinions and an appetite for confrontation. It can breed a very negative mindset that you’re doing everything wrong for your child. But there’s another side to social media that offers so much support and makes moms not some idealized figures but human.
I know this from personal experience. Three years ago, my husband and I shared our miscarriage on social media—it was such a random leap of faith but opening up about that pain was really the only thing that got me through it. Thousands of women reached out with their own stories and it showed me a whole community that I didn’t really see before. It made me feel so much less alone.
After 22 hours of labor ending in a C-section, our daughter Drew Hazel East was born happy and healthy. After we brought her home, I thought about how healing it felt to share my miscarriage and decided to open up about feeling like a failure for having a C-section. I still had doubts about the whole thing—Should I feel guilty? Did I do the right thing? Seeing messages like “I went through the same thing and I felt the same way,” was so reassuring. I stopped feeling like a failure as a mom and felt human again.
When we’d shared our miscarriage story, I felt this frustration: Why aren’t these feelings of insecurity and shame talked about more? Why do women feel like they have to keep it hidden? I think the same thing goes for having a kid—people make every topic so dramatic, so controversial, and so political. You’re a natural birth mom or an elective C-section mom. A breastfeeding mom or a formula mom. A stay-at-home mom or a working mom. There are so many topics that just alienate you from the world immediately.
I think that’s the wrong approach. The moment I got to hold my daughter for the first time, I literally could have laughed at myself and everything that I cared about before that moment. For me to have cared so much about what it would mean if I had an epidural was crazy—I’d brought my daughter into the world happy and healthy. And that was all that mattered in my first moments as a mom.
Now I think being strong as a mom is learning how to go with the flow. You can have your plans and you can have your preferences about what’s best, but at the end of the day it’s about you and your child figuring things out together. Being strong as a mom isn’t sticking to a plan, it’s figuring it out and wrestling through it. It’s about being able to hold your baby and say, “Okay, we made it one step closer to whatever the goal is.” And being okay with however you get there.
Shawn Johnson East is an Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast, YouTuber and mom. Follow her at @shawnjohnson.
Most people know Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele from Fifty Shades of Grey, but I know her as “celebrity who gives the most iconic interviews on talk shows.” Seriously, if you haven’t gone down a Dakota Johnson interview hole, then I strongly suggest you do. She is refreshingly unfiltered with a dry, almost awkward sense of humor. Look at this clip from The Tonight Show—when she shut down Jimmy Fallon for not letting her talk—or her acceptance speech from the 2016 People’s Choice Awards as proof. (Before getting to the microphone she had a slight wardrobe malfunction and said, “It’s not like nobody here hasn’t already seen my boobs.”)
The latest example of Johnson’s quick wit happened last week during her interview on The Ellen Show. Host Ellen DeGeneres claimed Johnson didn’t invite her to her birthday party in early October—which Johnson countered in a cheeky, deadpan tone.
“Actually, no. That’s not the truth, Ellen. You were invited,” Johnson said. “Last time I was on the show, last year, you gave me a bunch of shit about not inviting you, but I didn’t even know you wanted to be invited.”
“Who doesn’t want to be invited to a party?” DeGeneres asked, to which Johnson said, “Well, I didn’t even know you liked me.”
“Of course, I like you! You know I like you! You’ve been on the show many times,” DeGeneres replied.
But Johnson contests that she did invite DeGeneres to her party. Their exchange gets even more hilariously awkward from there, with DeGeneres ultimately realizing she was out of town the weekend of Johnson’s birthday. (A few people have pointed out Johnson’s party was the same weekend DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi were photographed at a football game in Dallas with former president George W. Bush.)
Watch the interview for yourself, below:
[embedded content]
Twitter is having an absolute field day with this—though it’s important to note there probably wasn’t any actual tension between Johnson and DeGeneres, as some have suggested. This was clearly just a funny miscommunication between two celebs, and Johnson’s sense of humor just gave off the illusion of awkwardness. Nevertheless, the reactions are gold.
One thing is for sure: You can count on Ellen DeGeneres attending Dakota Johnson’s birthday party next year.
Have you ever left a chocolate bar in the back of a drawer and then gone to take a bite? Sometimes, instead of luscious and smooth, it’s somehow become…grittier. The cocoa butter has changed its texture.
In college, Arielle Johnson encountered one such piece of chocolate and was fascinated. So the future food scientist decided to run an experiment where she modeled the crystals of chocolate to get to the bottom of it. That kind of exploration—of the properties that make food and flavor what it is—has been the crux of Dr. Johnson’s work ever since. And her studies have taken her from the world’s best restaurant, to MIT, and the Food Network.
Johnson, 32, describes flavor as “a composite sense evolved to integrate taste and smell (with input from the other senses) to give us information and pleasure from the food we eat. Flavor is a visceral link, perhaps the most essential link, between culture, evolution, ecology, health, and biodiversity. In the brain, flavor cross-talks extensively with emotions and memory.” It’s what makes you associate that bite of lasagna with Sundays at your grandma’s house or cheap vodka with the first time you got sick from drinking in college.
After getting her PhD in flavor chemistry and gastronomy at University of California, Davis, Johnson went to intern with René Redzepi, the head chef at Noma, the two-Michelin-star Denmark-based restaurant that in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2014 was named the “Best Restaurant in the World” by Restaurant magazine. (As of 2019 it’s ranked second.) Redzepi had just launched the Nordic Food Lab, an interdisciplinary research organization studying the edible potential of the Nordic region. And when Johnson first got there in 2012, the lab was held on a houseboat in the middle of Copenhagen where it welcomed chefs, scientists, and thinkers from all over the world to talk food. Over time the lab has worked with bloody, jelly fish, and larvae—but while Johnson was there they had a singular obsession. Insects, insects, insects. (One of Noma’s most notorious dishes was dressed with live ants.)
“When I got there they were super interested in the possibilities for eating insects. And a chef from Brazil brought these Amazon rainforest ants that tasted like lemongrass, coriander, and ginger. It was like, ‘Wow, how the hell do they taste like that?’ I figured out that you could make connections between insect science, microbiology, ethnobotany and all these other fields,” she says. “I’d found a niche where it really helped me at the lab to have my chemistry background because insect scientists will be looking at the molecules that make insects have lemongrass or other flavors, but they’ll be looking at them as pheromones—not flavors. So if you’re looking for a recipe in a paper about insects, you’re not going to find it; but if you know enough about chemistry, you can help find the right flavors for it.”
I’m not saying that I stayed all the way out of it. I wouldn’t say I’m not in any drama. I definitely wanted to stay out going into it. But I would say, being the man that my mom taught me to be—just being a good human being, a good person—helps to avoid a lot of conflict.
What’s your take, then, on the drama surrounding Hannah and Blake?
Hannah is such a sweet woman that I was kind of feeling bad for her because she’s growing and learning how to deal with, you know, letting someone down while on camera. You know, it’s not the easiest thing to do, but she handled herself well. You’ve got to continue to watch. With Dylan and Blake, I’m completely biased because Dylan’s my little brother. I love Dylan, and I tried to instill confidence in him and let him know that he has to speak things into existence and continue to go after Hannah.
I know you can’t share any spoilers, but what was your mindset leaving the show?
Great question. I’m happy that I went on Paradise. We’ll see in the near future what my Facebook relationship status is…
Speaking of relationship status, a lot of people would like to see you as the next Bachelor… What can you say about that?
I can say that it’s incredibly awesome and a great feeling that people even consider me or think I’ll be a great Bachelor. Quite honestly, that warms my spirit. Like, straight up.
Let’s just say for fun you’re single when you leave Paradise. What are you looking for in a partner?
I like core values. I like loyalty, ambition, and women who are feisty. I find that a feisty woman, I’m attracted to for some reason. Even if they get on my nerves, I’m attracted to it still. I look for sexiness. And I look for someone who can teach me something. Say you’re a dental hygienist or an astronaut, just teach me something.
Any deal-breakers?
Oh, deal-breakers. Yeah. I’m personally not into someone that smokes nicotine.
You talk a lot about how close you are to your mom and grandma. Who would they want to see you with?
I know this is cliché, but they just want me to be happy. I mean, they think they know what I like, but they just want me to be happy. You know how parents are. They’ll be like, “Oh, you’ll like this person!” And I’m like, “No, mom, I don’t like them.” [Laughs]
.jpg)
