Instagram / Bekah MartinezThe Bachelor alum Bekah Martinez says a stranger sexually assaulted her while she waking a walk with her two children.
The 26-year-old, who competed on the reality show in 2018 and is a mother to 2-year-old daughter Ruth and 9-month-old son Franklin, wrote about her experience on Friday, March 26, in an Instagram post that included a photo of herself standing while wearing a long tie-dyed top and brown shorts.
"I was just out taking a walk, looking like this, pushing my sleeping baby and holding hands with my toddler, when a teenager skateboarded by and grabbed my ass," Bekah wrote. "I felt totally powerless as I screamed at him 'THAT IS NOT OKAY. WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU?' I wanted to chase him down and pull him off his skateboard. Punch him in the back. Do something, anything to get through to him that what he did was so wrong. He looked so casual, not even in a rush, as he whizzed on past down the sidewalk, only glancing back when he was a block away."
She continued, "Ruth was so shaken. She kept repeating in her 2-year-old voice, 'you otay, mommy?' I'm not okay. I'm mad. I'm mad that this kid felt bold enough to touch me in the middle of the day, in a neighborhood, with my children by my side. What the f--k is he going to do to a woman when he's an adult in the cover of night?"
Bekah then recalled a similar traumatic incident. "I'm mad that this isn't the first time," she wrote. "I remember being alone on the beach at 21 when a man walked up to me with his dick in his hand. I felt helpless then, too."
"I hate this. I hate that this is the world my daughter will grow up in," she wrote. "I don't care what you have to do to teach your sons to respect the people around them. Threaten to chop their balls off, I don't give a f--k. But I hate knowing that there are predators around every turn, every corner. And the world will always be unsafe for women."
Bekah later told a sympathizing fan that she was on the phone with her sister at the time of the incident. She told another that after she got home, before she put her daughter down for a nap, she told her, "That was scary when that man came by on his skateboard, wasn't it? Mama was mad and sad. But I'm okay and you're safe."
Jade Roper Tolbert, who competed on The Bachelor in 2015 and later on Bachelor in Paradise, also offered Bekah words of support. "I'm so sorry this happened to you today, Bekah," she wrote. "This made my heart race and my stomach drop reading this knowing too what that helpless, angry, violating, humiliating, bewildered feeling feels like."
The reality star, a mother of a daughter and two sons, continued, "I promise I will raise my boys to be far better."
Becca Tilley, the runner-up on Jade's 19th season of The Bachelor, who later returned to the show in 2016, commented, "I'm reading this while blow drying my hair and had to stop and go sit down because I got so internally hot and angry. My blood is boiling for you. I'm so sorry this happened."