Two weeks after Zach Bryan announced his split from Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia, the podcast host is opening up about their relationship.
On Thursday's episode of Barstool Sports' “Best friends” On the podcast, LaPaglia discussed Bryan's alleged “narcissistic emotional abuse,” as well as his decision to reject a $12 million nondisclosure agreement offered by his team, which he called “his last chance to continue controlling me.”
“This is not about drama to me,” LaPaglia told co-hosts Dave Portnoy and Josh Richards. “This episode and the fact that I don't accept the money is not just for me. It's for anyone else who has been emotionally abused.
“I'm still scared because I'm scared of him,” she continued. “My brain is rewired and I'm afraid of making him angry.”
Representatives for Bryan did not immediately respond Friday to The Times' request for comment.
bryan last month confirmed their breakup with LaPaglia, whom he had been dating since July 2023, after screenshots of his profile circulated on celebrity dating app Raya online. Hours later, LaPaglia wrote on her Instagram Story that she was “really surprised” and shared plans to “get off social media for a while and try to heal in private.”
“I just wanted to deal with my breakup in private,” she said at the top of Thursday's podcast episode. “But they stole that from me, so here we are.”
While she was away on her That's My Best Friend tour in September, LaPaglia said, Bryan abruptly went from talking about their future together to saying, “I can't do this anymore.” In his tour documentary, he said, “You can slowly see the life fading from my fucking eyes.”
A “crazy cycle” ensued, LaPaglia said, in which Bryan lashed out and then begged her to stay. Then one morning, she said, he told her he was returning to Oklahoma: “I knew that would be the last time I would see him.”
LaPaglia said she hadn't told her family about the split before Bryan posted about it. “Everyone in my life found out about my breakup through their Instagram story.”
After that, it was crickets from Bryan and one settlement offer after another from his team, he said. The final offer was $12 million, what Portnoy called “life-changing money.”
LaPaglia said she refused to be like the women who believed they “had no choice but to take money from you, sign away their experiences, sign away what they went through.”
While LaPaglia maintained that his goal with the episode was not to “criticize everything he had done” but to “speak out in defense of other survivors,” he recalled some alleged examples of Bryan's behavior.
When Bryan didn't like the dress LaPaglia wore to the Golden Globes, she said, he unfollowed her. When she left her birthday party to go to bed early, he ended the night yelling at his friends. When she refused to leave her job at Barstool, he offered to pay her double her salary and told her she was “destined for so much more.”
“They made me hate so many things about myself that I want to love,” LaPaglia said. “Everything good he did for me, he made sure to ruin.”
“Why did I stay?” he added. “There is no answer.”
The “BFFs” episode comes after Portnoy and Richards released a song directed at Bryan, which they said his team has repeatedly tried to suppress through legal means. But with Barstool's reach on social media, Richards said, “it's still getting millions of views.”
“If people want to say, 'The distortion track was immature, me talking about [Bryan] I was immature,'” LaPaglia said near the podcast's conclusion. “You know what’s fucking immature?”
“The way you treated me,” he said, addressing Bryan. “Everything you did was immature.”
The day before the episode aired, Bryan announced the release of his latest single, “This World's a Giant”, on instagram.
The singer said that upon returning home to Oklahoma, he visited his mother's grave and “told her I stopped touring because I was accepted to get my master's degree in Paris next year.” (Country music magazine Holler later reported that Bryan's master's program takes place in Paris, France.)
Within hours of Bryan's post, LaPaglia wrote in it instagram story that she “can't believe how many women and men have experienced the same abuse. You have me, I will be a voice for all of you always.”
“This is two weeks from now, so I'm still processing everything I went through. I will continue to process and heal with all of you! she wrote. “Morale > 12 million.”
