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Bachelor Brad Womack's Ex: He Seems Like a Nice, Southern Gentleman, But...

Laurel Kagay insists, despite Brad's denial, that he proposed before he left for his second attempt at reality-TV love

By Natalie Finn, Ken Baker Mar 02, 2011 4:00 AMTags

Brad Womack is down to two women on The Bachelor. Again.

But though Womack has denied trying to pop the question right before he left for his second attempt at reality-TV love, ex-girlfriend Laurel Kagay insists he most certainly asked her to marry him.

And, she says, his TV persona isn't quite what he's like in real real life.

RELATED: Bachelor Brad spills on whether he's getting married

"When you first meet Brad, anybody falls in love with him because he is the sweetest guy," Kagay said in an exclusive interview with E! News. "If you really know him, that's not how he stays."

"He's the type of guy who will go to therapy for a few weeks and think everything is fixed and he's changed and he's wonderful—and then it just goes back," she said.

Well, Womack supposedly spent the last three years in therapy to work on his issues after he failed to pick a mate on The Bachelor's 11th season, so maybe he has changed?

Kagay described dating Womack—which she did off and on for eight years—as "hard."

"I always felt like I had to be someone else or try to be someone who he wanted," Kaygay recalled.

But though they seemingly broke up "hundreds" of times, she said, Womack didn't seem willing to let her go, especially one time when he showed up at the Austin, Texas, spa where she worked to try to patch things up.

"He'd come and just start bawling, so upset, begging me to be with him and saying he was going to change and he couldn't live without me," Kagay told E! News. "That's the only time I felt really scared."

And then, she said, he started texting her last August, writing things like "I want to marry you."

"He told me he wanted to be with me, I was everything to him and wanted to marry me," Kagay said. "He didn't have a ring, but I considered that a proposal...I'm telling the truth. He knows that, his family knows that, his friends know that."

Womack has denied this, telling George Lopez, "I can 100 percent tell you I did not actually ask this woman to marry me."

But Kagay's not bitter, she said.

"I want him to know I want him to be happy," she concluded. Talking about her past "felt like, for me, it was a way to finally be done with it and say how I feel, just get it off my chest. And I guess this has to be our closure."

Considering Womack said he's "very much in love" now (or at least he was in January), his ex may best be turning the page.