Nick Viall’s wife, Natalie Joy, still can’t believe the internet isn’t over their airplane text saga.
“I did an ‘Ask Me Anything’ [on Instagram] the other day and someone asked, ‘Are you still getting crucified for your airplane text story?’” Joy, 26, recalled on the Thursday, June 5, episode of her husband’s eponymous “Viall Files” podcast. “I’m like, ‘Was I getting crucified?’”
Viall, 44, chimed in and claimed that “anyone who doesn’t have a kid” acted like they hated Joy for her comments.
Joy previously revealed on a May episode of the podcast that she allegedly witnessed a plane passenger texting about their 16-month-old daughter, River Rose, after watching the family board business class on a recent flight.
“We’ve not left the gate, and I clocked the woman in front of me. Y’all know I love an eavesdrop phone read on an airplane,” Joy claimed late last month. “So the woman in front of me, who I thought, honestly, was going to be quite nice because we made eye contact as we were boarding. So I read on her phone, the first thing I see is, ‘18-month-old in business class.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, here we go.’”
Joy further accused the woman of texting about how River was “screaming up a storm” while waiting for the plane to take off.
“As she’s finishing her text, I lean up and tap her on the shoulder, and I said, ‘It’s t-h-e-i-r. Their kid, not there,’” Joy added, claiming the woman misspelled a word in her message. “[I asked if she was] texting about my kid. She kind of, like, huffs and puffs and turns, and then she brings out her phone — same level, same brightness, same text size — and starts going, ‘She just confronted me about a spelling error. She’s reading my text from behind me. LOL. I respect it.’”
On a follow-up episode of “Viall Files,” Joy acknowledged that she received more hate for “reading the text than for the woman talking s*** on [her] kid.”
Viall and Joy further acknowledged the online vitriol during Thursday’s episode.
“Every once in a while, Natalie gets some DM like, ‘I don’t know why you get all the hate that you do, but I love you,’” Viall said. “It’s mostly my fault because that was definitely how people complimented me early in my Bachelor days ‘cause people wanted to let me know that, like, ‘I’m the one fan you have. I rode for you, Nick, [and] I’m sorry the world hates you.’”
After back-to-back seasons of The Bachelorette and a stint on Bachelor in Paradise, Viall served as the franchise lead in 2017. He was briefly engaged to Vanessa Grimaldi. Four years later in 2021, he started dating Joy, whom he married in April 2024.
