In the now-infamous final rose ceremony on the November 19 season finale of The Bachelor, Austin, Texas bar entrepreneur Brad Womack made reality TV history when he shockingly kissed both of the show’s finalists… goodbye.

Both DeAnna Pappas and Jenni Croft were stunned by the move - along with millions of viewers of The Bachelor watching at home.

Brad Womack offered vague explanations in a special after-show, but this week, he told Us Weekly the real reason he let both of the ladies go.

“[DeAnna Pappas] and I had something that’s pretty special. But I did not see this crazy love that would turn into a lifetime,” says a single Brad.

Brad Womack: Still single and trying to explain his dubious actions.

“I’m looking for the same things that I said all along — a best friend, a life-long partner and someone to fall madly in love with,” Womack said. “I didn’t want to lead anybody on. I was very honest with both of the ladies about that.”

Brad had no comment on a recent story by E! Online insinuating that he really wanted Bettina Bell, but knew it wouldn’t work after a bad family visit.

At least Jenni Croft has already moved on. That much we know.

Fans have been searching far and wide for possible insight into the mind of Brad Womack, who spurned both Jenni Croft and DeAnna Pappas last week on the finale of The Bachelor. Now an insider has shed new light on the situation.

According to Kristin Veitch of E! Online, the real reason for Brad Womack’s often criticized and shocking decision to choose either Jenni or DeAnna in the finale had, in reality, little to do with Jenni nor DeAnna, but with Bettina Bell.

Says a rock-solid source: “Brad was really into Bettina, who made it to the final four. But when he went to visit her parents, Bettina’s father was so awful to him, Brad knew it wouldn’t work. So, he was just sort of over the whole thing.”

Was Bettina Bell behind Brad Womack’s bungled Bachelor finale?

Brad visited Bettina’s home in the sixth episode of this season (the reality show’s 11th) and Bell’s father sort of sealed her fate when he said he was “disappointed” by Brad’s lack of a college degree, as well as with Womack’s career choice.

Brad had only known Bettina Bell for a few weeks at the time, and being torn apart on national TV is not the sort of thing you want in a first impression.

So does this make Brad Womack’s decision better or worse?

Obviously it’s still painful for DeAnna Pappas and Jenni Croft, who had their hearts ripped out on TV, and for viewers, who felt like they themselves got robbed. But this certainly casts Womack - and Bettina Bell - in a new light.

Brad Womack has a supporter in Jen Schefft. She’s probably the only one who watched last week’s finale of The Bachelor and doesn’t want him killed.

ABC’s push for last week’s season-ending episode of The Bachelor has many viewers feeling they were duped, the New York Daily News reports.

ABC promoted the show all week using a clip - accompanied by the sound of a woman crying - in which Brad Womack said that he had found the one.

Based on the promos, die-hard viewers of the long-running series expected Brad found true love, or at least the reality TV equivalent. Not to be.

After a long, hard blitz of promos, misleadingly positive interviews and clips featuring a “happy” Brad Womack, he and ABC got together and pulled a fast one.

Both DeAnna Pappas or Jenni Croft were rejected.

As a result, viewers are irate.

“I have been watching The Bachelor series from the very beginning … but this is IT FOR ME!” wrote one frustrated fan on the show’s message board.

“I cannot believe that ABC would air a program that ended this way when it was clearly lies and manipulation on Brad Womack’s part,” said another.

“I guess we got wrapped up in the fairy tale. Many of us have used The Bachelor to believe,” wrote a fan. “Unfortunately, none of us will believe again. Thanks, ABC, for breaking our hearts! Too bad Brad was the one to do it.”

An ABC spokeswoman had no comment on the viewer outrage. Jenni Croft is reportedly dating her ex-boyfriend now, incidentally. Good for her.

As Brad Womack receives endless flak for dissing both Jenni Croft and Deanna Pappas, someone who can relate to The Bachelor’s situation is coming to his defense:

Former Bachelorette, Jen Scheft.

“No one seems to be concerned about Brad’s future - except, maybe, the women he didn’t choose,” Schefft, the 2005 Bachelorette who turned down both of her final suitors, wrote on The Huffington Post. “On the ["After the Final Rose"] show, they were still complaining that he didn’t give them a chance, that they could have been happy together, and that his actions were unfair.

What would have been more unfair is if Brad wasn’t honest with himself - or them - and continued a relationship [let alone proposed] when he felt it wasn’t right.”

Moreover, Schefft gives “Brad a lot of credit for not playing into the fantasy the show creates,” while saying “it’s entirely possible to meet 25 beautiful women (or 25 handsome men) and not fall in love with any of them… in a matter of six weeks… in isolation… with cameras all around.”

Wait, she’s saying The Bachelor is NOT the ideal way to fall in love? There’s a shocker!

Schefft also compared herself to Womack, saying that when she decided to remain single at the end of The Bachelorette, she found herself in the center of a lot of negative press.

“I can bet [Brad Womack] won’t be walking around with a stigma of being ‘too hard to please.’ That’s what people think when a woman chooses not to be with a ‘perfect’ guy - as if good looks and money are all she needs,” Schefft wrote. “For some reason, it’s more acceptable for a man to turn down a woman than it is for a woman to reject a man.”

Last night, Brad faced both Jenni Croft and DeAnna Pappas, as well as all of America, to answer their questions on what went wrong on The Bachelor.

Host Chris Harrison interviews Jenni, who admits she was completely shocked Brad didn’t choose her. She felt “mislead” by Brad Womack, especially given many little comments that he’d said to her along the way.

Jenni shows class in saying how disappointed she was to see Brad Womack do the same thing to DeAnna Pappas, especially given the way it was handled (giving her that ray of hope just as he dropped the “but”).

Jenni Croft says Brad should have given someone a chance, even in the form of dating. But next we get to hear what DeAnna Pappas has to say.

She still seems confused, a little bit angry… and maybe a little hopeful that Brad will reverse his decision on this night and choose her for real.

In the end, Brad Womack stood alone.

“I’m angry because it’s so confusing… did he think something better was going to come along?” DeAnna said, admitting that she’s thought about him every day since and she’d say yes if he asked her for another chance.

Brad Womack then arrives to a mixture of applause and boos. He says that he made his decision because he didn’t want to make any false promises. Boo.

Chris lets it slip that Brad actually asked the network fly DeAnna’s father out for the final ceremony, so Brad could ask for her hand in marriage. His gut told him something was wrong when he went to buy the ring, however.

Jenni Croft comes out to join him and Brad Womack says it “hurts deep” to have Jenni lose respect for him. He feels he showed respect by walking.

DeAnna takes Jenni Croft’s place then and is nervous. “Please don’t hold it against me that I didn’t fall in love. I’m just as heartbroken as you are.”

Brad says to DeAnna Pappas that he thinks about her every single day, and just as it sounds like maybe he might be going to throw us for another loop by taking her back, DeAnna tries to force the issue… and Brad Womack replies that he’s “very confident” in his decision, crushing her once again.

DeAnna can’t hold back and cries, “[You’re] the one person that I trusted most out of all of this, and you broke my heart.”

Well, we didn’t see that one coming.

Brad Womack made history last night on The Bachelor by electing not to give a final rose to either of his remaining ladies- Jenni Croft or DeAnna Pappas - during The Bachelor 11th season finale.

The fact that he didn’t pick either one of us is harder to deal with,” said a tearful DeAnna Pappas, a 25-year-old realtor from Neunan, Ga., who was rejected very shortly after Brad Womack had already sent Jenni Croft packing.

“This is one of the worst feelings in the world… telling someone how you feel about them and they kind of just reject your feelings,” Jenni Croft, a 27-year-old Phoenix Suns cheerleader originally from Wichita, Ks., said. “[That's] the reason why it’s so hard for me to tell people how I feel.”

Needless to say, Brad Womack also failed to propose marriage to either. It was certainly a tough pill for DeAnna Pappas and Jenni Croft to swallow.

Brad Womack said that while he could see both DeAnna Pappas (right) and Jenni Croft (left) being his wife, he found himself in quite the quandary. In the end, he certainly found a unique and historic way out of that quandary.

Take a look at how he got there, from the family visits to the final talks in which he lets them go, in our episode guide to The Bachelor finale …

On tonight’s season finale of The Bachelor, Brad Womack will bring home the final two women to meet his family. Only one of whom will win his heart.

Will it be DeAnna Pappas, the 25-year-old Realtor, part-time bartender and full-time Southern gal? Or Jenni Croft, the 27-year-old Wichita native and Phoenix Suns dancer and former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

Will Brad Womack choose Jenni Croft, with whom he’s had chemistry since the beginning, and whose commitment to her career has appealed to Brad?

Will Brad Womack choose DeAnna Pappas, the traditional beauty with whom he had initial sparks, and whose family visit really hit the mark with Brad?

Who will get the final rose from Brad Womack? Will it be DeAnna Pappas or Jenni Croft? Only time will tell. Tonight. In just a few more hours. This should be hot.

Why did Bettina Bell risk heartbreak and humiliation on The Bachelor? In part because she is childhood pals with Tessa Horst, who won the heart of last season’s Bachelor, Andy Baldwin, on the reality dating series.

“I don’t know if I would have done it if it weren’t for her,” Bettina Bell, 27, now a real estate agent in Hermosa Beach, Calif., told the Washington Post.

The tall blonde was among the final three women competing for a proposal from Texan Brad Womack (he started with 25) until he eliminated her last week; her exit was one of the most dignified ever on a show known for weepy hysterics.

  A photo of Bettina Bell and Brad Womack on The Bachelor.

“What I was feeling was so good,” Bettina Bell told Brad Womack as she was given the boot, but “… you aren’t right for me and obviously vice versa.”

Seems that - brace yourself - there’s not a lot of reality in reality TV.

“You see us on a date, but we have five producers standing around,” Bettina Bell said. The intimacy-on-camera? As yucky as you’d expect. “The producers say, ‘If you give us a kiss on camera, then we’ll leave.’”

Although sometimes, she says, “you do get lost in the moment.”

And now Bettina Bell wonders how real the emotions were.

On air, she claimed to be “completely falling in love.” But she told the Post that “it was more of a crush, magnified by the fact that there are 24 other women who are digging the guy you dig. So it’s all blown out of proportion… You’re in this dreamland, and all of a sudden you come to reality again.”

Indeed, few couples from The Bachelor endure. And by few we mean none. Tessa Horst and Andy Baldwin’s TV engagement is currently on hold.

Bell’s only regret: bringing a TV crew into her parents’ home in D.C., at which point her skeptical dad was cast as a killjoy. But the gig did get her name out there to a lot of folks looking to buy in Hermosa Beach.

“Business has never been busier,” Bettina says.

The Women Tell All. The Bachelor’s penultimate episode was, as usual, the special in which the rejected babes go off on Brad Womack. And then some.

Host Chris Harrison took us back and relived some of the best moments this season of The Bachelor with the defeated ladies, some of whom were put in the hot seat while others played it cool. The women then placed their bets on whether Jenni Croft or DeAnna Pappas would win Brad Womack’s heart on next week’s finale.

Follow the link to relive all the drama or catch up on what you missed last night in the Scoop’s guide to The Bachelor: The Women Tell All!

Having bid farewell to Sheena Stewart a week ago, only three women remained for The Bachelor star Brad Womack. It was time for individual overnight dates in Mexico, and boy, what dates they turned out to be.

Bettina, Jenni Croft and DeAnna Pappas each vied for the affections of the Texas entrepreneur. In the end, only two would remain standing. But who?

Brad Womack had his first date in Cabo San Lucas with Jenni Croft. The two went swimming at the dolphins which proved to be fun and unique.

Next, Brad headed out for a day of sailing with Bettina. At dinner, they rehash the fight they had when he visited Bettina’s family in D.C.

Brad Womack’s final date was with DeAnna Pappas and they had a really great time riding dune buggies. He admitted to having strong feelings for her in his interview, and said she had all of the qualities he was looking for.

How did it play out? Who’s on their way home while the other two prepare for the biggest moment of their lives? Catch up on all the action in our episode guide to last night’s thrilling edition of The Bachelor …