Jade and Tanner Tolbert, who met on Bachelor in Paradise and are now married with children, have been accused of cheating DraftKings for $1 million. It is an extreme long shot to win the top prize on the popular daily fantasy sports website, and the fact that a well-known reality television couple was able to pull it off raised some suspicions.
Jade and Tanner met on season two of Bachelor in Paradise, finding relatively drama-free romance on a show renowned for tumult. Tanner proposed at the end, and the two now have a couple of kids, Emerson and Brook. The two have been transparent about the less-than-ideal circumstances surrounding the birth of their children. They revealed that they had a miscarriage after getting pregnant during filming. And Brook, the younger of the two children, decided he was ready to enter this world a little earlier than usual. Jade couldn’t make it to the hospital, so she gave birth to Brook in her closet. During the most recent season of Bachelor in Paradise, Tanner called out Demi Burnett for pre-planning her relationship with Kristian Haggerty. It wasn’t a great look for him.
Also not a good look is cheating to win $1 million on DraftKings during the NFL’s wild-card weekend. A representative for the Tolberts issued a statement (via CNN) that said, “We respect that DraftKings feels they must do their due diligence in regard to Jade winning their $1 million dollar prize for the fantasy contest for the NFL’s wild-card round this weekend.” The representative suggested that the accusations of cheating may have been different had it not been a woman who had won and if it wasn’t someone already in the public eye.
Jade said that she and her husband each submitted 150 picks, which cost $3,750 times two, without any overlap, doubling their chances of winning. The DraftKings rules prohibit collusion and, “team-building complementary lineups which serve to work together AND executing a strategy that may create any unfair advantage over individual play.” That appears to be exactly what Tanner and Jade did.
That being said, these two aren’t the only ones to try and game the system. It would be naive to believe that the Tolberts are the first to collude with each other to secure the million dollar prize. If their victory is delegitimized by DraftKings, fine. Bachelor Nation shouldn’t be up in arms about it. The Tolberts’ representative made an apt point, mentioning that because it was Jade, not professed NFL fan Tanner, who won, people were more skeptical of the result. It is a constant reminder of the dangerous predisposition many still make about women and sports, assuming they can’t know as much as men, simply because they are women. Jade and Tanner may have technically cheated to secure the million, but let’s cut them some slack when it comes to attacking their character. If the Bachelor in Paradise couple has time to devote to creating 300 distinct fantasy football lineups, they deserve at least something in return.
Next: Bachelor in Paradise’s Hannah Godwin & Dylan Barbour on Which Bachelor Alums Are Coming to Wedding
Source: CNN, DraftKings
