She was behind the scenes, and between his sheets.
A “Bachelor” producer who slept with the show’s leading man penned a tell-all — and it was not all roses when she told him she was writing it.
When Julie LaPlaca revealed to her former fling, Peter Weber, that she was working on the memoir, she got a very thorny reply.
“I told him after I finished my first draft and offered to let him read an early copy, and instead he panicked, threatened to sue, and blocked me,” LaPlaca, 41, told The Post ahead of the Tuesday release of “The Love Producer.”
“So then I really cooperated with him in terms of wanting to connect him with my people so that he could read it, and then he just ghosted me.”
This week, Weber, 34, a pilot who was featured on Season 24 of “The Bachelor,” which aired in 2020, vented his frustration over the book’s impending publication via an Instagram comment.
“What I’ll say is this; I asked Julie on multiple occasions to please keep private, intimate details, private. This wasn’t about a tv show anymore,” he wrote.
LaPlaca, a Connecticut native who now lives in Topanga, Calif., said she is choosing to “honor his opinion.”
“I think Peter is coming from a place of fear and ego instead of a place of love . . . I wish he had read the book and can see that I’m coming from my heart,” she said.
In the memoir, LaPlaca reveals the first time they had sex — in 2020 at Weber’s parents’ house, where he was living at the time, after watching an episode from his season of “The Bachelor,” which had been filmed in 2019.
“Peter came to the doorway. ‘Jules, come here,’ he said. I walked into his room, not realizing what was about to happen . . . ‘We don’t have to — this is bad,’ he said. ‘It’s up to you.’ . . . My face said it all. He leaned in and we kissed,” she wrote.
“Peter reached up and turned the lights off, just like in the fantasy suites. The rest is what happens when the cameras stop rolling, and stays between Peter and me.”
LaPlaca said she left out the physical details of that hookup, and the two that followed, to honor her feelings for Weber, to whom she eventually confessed her love years later.
“I’m not here to spill any juicy details. I’m just here to share my truth,” she said.
She also recalled the hate she got from “Bachelor” fans before she even slept with Weber.
On New Year’s Eve in 2019, while Weber’s “Bachelor” season was still airing and America did not yet know he didn’t end up with Hannah Ann Sluss, to whom he proposed on the show, LaPlaca joined him in Times Square for his “Rockin’ Eve” appearance.
She posted an Instagram photo of the evening, and internet sleuths saw Weber’s jacket in the background, and came to the conclusion that they ended up together.
“I had people comparing me to Harvey Weinstein . . . telling me I need to get cancer and die . . . telling me I was ugly . . . There are some mean trolls out there,” she said.
During all that drama, LaPlaca got a call from “Bachelor” creator Mike Fleiss, who told her the network was considering her for the role of “The Bachelorette.”
“They seemed really excited about it and it really felt like it was going to happen . . . It really was a Cinderella story . . . So I was disappointed when it didn’t,” she said.
LaPlaca decided to quit after seven years with the “Bachelor” franchise, never telling her bosses about her tryst with Weber.
“I had a lot of fear around it. I dreaded anyone finding out. I lived in paranoia for a while . . . and ultimately it was probably one of the main reasons why I left the show,” said LaPlaca, who is now a certified life coach and hypnotherapist.
Although LaPlaca said it’s “very possible” she’d still be working for the “Bachelor” had she not fallen in love with Weber, she realizes everything happened for the best.
“The lifestyle as a reality TV producer really isn’t a healthy one. You think it’s normal that your eye is twitching for like, three weeks straight, and my hair was thinning and I was pulling out chunks and waking up in piles of sweat,” she said.
“And so I think it all unfolded exactly as it should.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
