Jesse James Palmer (born October 5, 1978) is a Canadian television personality, sports commentator, actor, and former professional football player who was a quarterback in the National Football League (NFL) for five seasons in the early 2000s. Palmer played college football for the University of Florida, and thereafter, he played professionally for the New York Giants and San Francisco 49ers in the NFL before spending half of the 2006 season with the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League (CFL). Palmer was cast in 2004 as the bachelor on the fifth season of the reality television series The Bachelor. He went on to become a college football analyst for ESPN/ABC in the United States, and has been a contributor to The Sports Network (TSN) in Canada. He was also a contributor to ABC's Good Morning America. In 2018, he hosted the kickoff season of The Proposal on ABC. Since 2017 he has hosted the Holiday Baking Championship on Food Network. Jesse was host of DailyMailTV from 2017 to 2020. Palmer married model Emely Fardo on June 5, 2020, at a close friend's house in Connecticut. In 2021, Palmer was named as the permanent host of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.
Palmer was born in Toronto, Ontario, and raised in Nepean, Ontario, a suburb of Ottawa. He attended both Confederation and St. Pius X high schools, although he played all of his amateur football on teams in the Ontario Minor Football Association and most importantly with the Ottawa Norsemen and Myers Riders Football Clubs in Ottawa.
His father, Bill Palmer, played for the Ottawa Rough Riders. His mother, Susan, was a prominent fashion and print model, co-founder of Barrett Palmer Models and former owner of the original ITM: International Top Models, a modeling agency and training centre located in Ottawa; eventually became the current agency MIM Model International Management.

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