Melissa Rycroft, the former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who found fame on The Bachelor, was booked into the Tarrant County Corrections Center in Fort Worth on Sunday on a second charge of driving while intoxicated — while she is still serving 20 months of probation for her first DWI. Southlake police say officers were called shortly before 5:50 p.m. on Saturday after a vehicle struck an ambulance that was stopped at a stop sign and drove away; officers located the driver and identified her as Rycroft, and she was processed at the Keller Regional Detention Facility before being taken to the county jail.
Jail records show three charges from Sunday's arrest: driving while intoxicated, driving while her licence was invalid with a prior conviction or suspension and without financial responsibility, and a collision causing damage to a vehicle. Bond was set at $7,500 on the DWI charge, $500 on the licence charge and $1,000 on the collision charge — $9,000 in total — and the bail had not been posted in the reports published Monday, leaving the 43-year-old in custody.
The new arrest comes just over a year after Southlake police — the same department — arrested Rycroft on September 23, 2025, after a single-vehicle crash in which a black Cadillac Escalade struck a tree. She pleaded guilty this August under a deal that put her on 20 months of probation instead of serving 280 days in jail, with about $2,087 in fines and court fees, 36 hours of community service, a DWI education course and a substance-abuse evaluation. The deal also barred her from drinking alcohol at all, required her to commit no new offence, and allowed her to drive only a vehicle fitted with a camera-enabled ignition interlock.
That is what makes Sunday's arrest so serious for her: if the new charges are proven, the alleged conduct — drinking, driving and a collision — breaches the very terms that kept her out of jail, and a court can revisit the probation and the 280 days she avoided. For everyone else on the road, the case is a plain reminder of why those terms exist: police say the vehicle she is accused of hitting and leaving was an ambulance, the kind of crew every family depends on arriving safely when they call for help.
Rycroft rose to fame on season 13 of The Bachelor in 2009 and won Dancing With the Stars: All-Stars in 2012; she is married with three children. After her 2025 arrest she wrote to a supporter: "Life really sucks right now and I'm struggling, but I'm trying to march forward." Her lawyer, Bret Martin, said after the first arrest that an arrest is no indication of guilt and that she is presumed innocent unless proven guilty. She has not publicly commented on Sunday's arrest.
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