Below Deck baby drama.
During part two of the Below Deck Sailing Yacht season two reunion, which aired tonight, June 22 on Bravo, Dani Soares and Jean-Luc Cerza-Lanaux gave an update on their relationship status and discussed the unconfirmed paternity of the stewardess’ daughter Lilly.
As E! News readers well know, Dani surprised Below Deck fans when she announced in April that she was going to be a mom. Before long, fans began wondering if her former co-star was the father.
And, as Dani shared in the new episode, she’s pretty confident that the season two deckhand, often called JL, is the father of her daughter, telling reunion host Andy Cohen, “Well, let’s put it this way, this baby was made during the season while we had cameras 24/7 with us and I only slept with one guy, so…”
As she continued, Dani claimed that her ex hasn’t supported her throughout the pregnancy. “He thinks it’s not his child,” she added. “And he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
Per the Bravo personality, she learned she was pregnant upon returning to Australia after filming. “I told him, and he was obviously a bit shocked and everything, but he seemed supportive,” she noted. “He told me he would support me, whatever I decided to do. So, he was supportive in the beginning, and then it just changed. Like, around December things just changed, and he was just not interested anymore.”
Apparently, on New Year’s, Dani received a text that allegedly read: “Don’t go around telling people I’m the dad of this child. And I want a DNA test.” According to Dani, she agreed to the DNA test as long as Jean-Luc organized and paid for it.
Laurent Basset/Bravo“He hasn’t done anything,” she revealed. “I asked him again. But, since January, he’s asked about the baby like, twice or three times.”
To make matters worse, after a “horrible comment” allegedly made by Jean-Luc’s mom, Dani now has “zero interest” in the family being “involved in [her] child’s life.”
However, in his own interview with Andy, Jean-Luc hit back that, if he is the father, he has every intention to be involved in Lilly’s life. “The fact that people are telling me that I want nothing to do with this child, it’s really tearing me up,” he snapped. “All my friends and all my family know the type of person that I am and know that I want everything to do with that child…If it is mine.”
Jean-Luc defended that he still didn’t know for sure whether Lilly, who was not born yet at the time of taping, was his child. On the status of the paternity test, Jean-Luc relayed, “There was talk of a DNA test, and I still want to do it…We’ve gone as far as me trying to reach out to her doctor’s office.”
Later on, Jean-Luc claimed he wanted to be present at the birth, noting, “The fact of me knowing that this could possibly be my child and not being there for the birth is f–king killing me.”
After watching his co-stars’ feelings on the drama, Jean-Luc asked them to not “judge a book by its cover.” He went on to confess that he even considered moving to Australia. “I’ve thought about every possible avenue, every f–king avenue, and I just haven’t come up with one yet,” he said. “To Dani, what we had on the show, for me, was real. I don’t care what anybody says, even now that we’re going through what we’re going through.”
Jean-Luc went on to call their relationship a “genuine” one and offered up an apology. “The fact that we are at where we are now, I’m really sorry,” he remarked. “I would assume to say that most of it is my fault. Maybe, because I’m the boy that you think that I am.”
Before concluding, he declared that he wanted to be there for Dani and wanted to co-parent Lilly, if she is his daughter.
For more episodes in the Below Deck franchise, be sure to head to Peacock.
(E!, Bravo and Peacock are all part of the NBCUniversal family.)
