Malibu Hills resident Ava Friedman had all the right reasons for saving The Bachelor mansion.
Friedman, a 16-year-old student who lives next to the famed ABC property, was concerned for her home’s well-being on Friday, November 9, during the deadly Woolsey Fire. She and her father made the dangerous trek down Kanan Road in Agoura Hills, California, on Friday to check on their own house — and helped to save The Bachelor estate in the process.
“Everything was smoky. We went to visit our house to see if it was still standing and to see if we could save anything. There was fire everywhere, so we really had no idea if our house was still standing,” Friedman exclusively told Us Weekly on Monday, November 12. “We got to our house and we were like, ‘Thank God it’s still standing.’ We were just very thankful, but we saw next door, at The Bachelor house, there was a fire.”
Friedman, a high school student, knew that the flames could not only take out the beloved property where The Bachelor and The Bachelorette films, but could also affect her own home. When there was no one in sight to help put out the fire, Friedman and her dad took matters into her own hands.
“There was no one on Kanan Road. It was like a ghost town because everyone had evacuated, so the only cars driving along Kanan were firefighters or police cars, basically,” she explained to Us. “So what we did is we went to Kanan and we basically put our emergencies on [in our car] and tried to flag down a police officer or a firefighter to see if they could put out the fire, because that was a big source of danger. That could have easily gone onto our property and more of The Bachelor property. So we literally flagged them down and said, ‘OK, our house is down there and the house next door is on fire. Can you please do what you can?’”
She added: “These firefighters went down to the house and we showed them where the fire had started at The Bachelor house and they put it out. One structure was already burned when [we saw that] the fire started, but the fire could have spread more and actually destroyed more of that property. So yeah, we’re really glad that we found a brave firefighter to put it out.”
Us broke the news earlier on Friday that the Bachelor Nation estate had succumbed to flames. “There was no one at the house at the point it caught on fire,” a source told Us at the time. “The part of the house that was used for production offices has burned down … The whole back house is burned down and it traveled up to the backyard.”
Show creator Mike Fleiss tweeted about the fire on Friday, asking fans to “pray for Malibu — and #TheBachelorMansion.”
A second insider told Us that season 23’s lead Colton Underwood and his contestants were safe from harm: “Production is not using the house anymore. Filming finished a couple weeks ago and they have been traveling internationally finishing Colton’s season.”
Bachelor producers told Us on Saturday, November 10, that the mansion “is primarily a private residence, and our main concern is with the family who has been displaced, their neighbors, and all the communities impacted by this tragic fire.”
Celebrities — including Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus, Gerard Butler and Camille Grammer — have been affected by the fires raging in Southern California. Although The Bachelor mansion was saved, Western Town at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, the set of shows such as Westworld, burned down.
