Corinne Olympios, a sexy, flirty and super-cunning 24-year-old Miami business owner, has been tapped by viewers and fans of the long-running reality show “The Bachelor” to be the primary villain character among the female contestants of the 21st season. Nothing more needs to be said of her calculatedly seductive pursuit of Bachelor 21 Nick Viall, an effort that seems to be reciprocated to some degree. But often the focus of the episodes seems to veer more on Corinne to the extent of demoting the other girls and Nick to borderline extras. For her it’s not been hard to do due to some facts of her life that she’s shared about herself, things that seem to reinforce her heel image more.
Like the fact that she has her own personal nanny. And one “Bachelor” viewer did a joke on this information that went out of hand.
Raquel and an online fund
Past episodes of "The Bachelor" have had Corinne mention having a nanny, an incongruous mental image due to the idea of nannies being hired to care for children. But Corinne has waxed prose on how her nanny Raquel has “kept her life together.” In her words, "She makes sure that my bed is made every morning, makes my cucumber and my, like, vegetable slices for lunch. She makes me lemon salad, she knows exactly how much oil, lemon and garlic salt I like." Due to her villain rep this pronouncement has produced the expected heel heat for Corinne sounding like a spoiled woman-child, and college student Mark Chandley decided to spring a harmless prank on the subject: he opened an account on crowd-funding platform GoFundMe for the comically dubious cause to “Free Raquel”.
Playing on Corinne’s villainous rep on “The Bachelor”, Chandley mused on the possibility that working for her may have caused Raquel the nanny to develop Stockholm syndrome that keeps her loyal to the pinnacle bad girl of Season 21. His GoFundMe post ends with: "Let's all help Raquel get a better job, to get back on her own two feet.
Let's help #FreeRaquel." He was quick to reveal this piece as a joke account online, but there were still a number of people who were taken in and donated. Chandley expected a dollar to “Free Raquel” at most; the fact that it would raise several hundred dollars despite being already outed as a sham was unexpected.
Corinne reacts
In between getting Nick Viall to fall for her – and perhaps falling for him as well – Corinne Olympios caught wind of the GoFundMe joke about her nanny and gave Mark Chandler both barrels for it. "Raquel is not a slave and my family and I treat her like part of the family," She exploded on Instagram with a screen grab of the “Free Raquel” page. "Leave it alone already it's getting old. Grow up." Chandler on his part plans to return the money to the donors.
