Brianna Chickenfry's breakup with country music star Zach Bryan has been pretty intense and very public. To fully share her side of the story, Brianna went on her BFFs Barstool Sports podcast with Dave Portnoy and Josh Richards, not long after her co-hosts dropped an epic Bryan diss track.
After Warner Music Group took down the diss track from YouTube and Spotify, the record label blocked the re-release because Richards is under contract with them.
In Thursday's pod, it was said that Bryan offered Brianna a $12 million nondisclosure agreement (NDA) -- and she turned it down. In describing her toxic relationship and emotional abuse she endured from Bryan, Brianna said she viewed the NDA as her ex's last shot at controlling how she lived her life.
Listening to Brianna describe how her relationship with Bryan evolved, it all began with a lot of love bombing in the first four months where Brianna viewed him as a great guy. For the uninitiated, love bombing just means that in the limerence phase, one partner really lays the loving on thick, only to essentially manipulate the other person later on. Pull the rug out from under them if you will. That love bombing is allegedly how Bryan convinced Brianna to get matching tattoos mere days into their romance.
What Brianna said ensued from those early days, however, was anything but fun or loving. Here's the first chunk of Brianna's lengthy chat that's most salient to this angle of the story:
"I fell in love with this person that doesn't exist. [...] After the four months of the love bombing, being the loveliest, best dude ever, it's just like all of a sudden, a switch. [...] There was always another excuse as to why he was treating me so poorly and why I'm crying myself to sleep every night. [...] I don't expect people to understand emotional abuse if you haven't been through it, and I hope you never have to go through it. But if you've been there, you know what I'm talking about. And it was just this constant cycle of like build you up, beat you down, apologize. Over and over and over.
So I was just rewired to be like, when we fought, he's going to apologize, and it's going to be OK, and I'm going to feel better. Because you crave that validation from the person. Because you're holding on to this person that you thought they were in the beginning. And it was just this crazy, awful cycle."
As that strand of thought goes on, Brianna said that she broke up with Bryan the prior October, but it didn't stick. As part of Bryan's apparent controlling behavior, he isolated Brianna from her friends, family, and work, completely flipping her life upside down while she essentially just tried to hang on.
Brianna later indicated that the control Bryan exerted over her extended to how she dressed, coming to a head with a fight between all the BFFs and Bryan at the Golden Globes.
It all started with the white dress Brianna wore, which she posted to her Instagram.
Emphasizing that she's not one to show off her body or wear scantily-clad clothing in public often, Brianna said that Bryan was furious behind the scenes, to the point where he blocked Dave and Josh on IG and did the same to Brianna very briefly.
Got all that? I think I do. It's a lot. Anyway, tying back into the toxic cycle Brianna describes above, Bryan then did a complete 180 about his significant other's Golden Globes dress,, sharing Brianna's post on his IG story, and fawning over how beautiful she looked.
"He didn't like my dress. He said he didn't want to date someone that presents themselves that way. And he unfollowed me, he unfollowed everyone, and I when I flew home...he ruined my night. Everything good, anything good I did for me, he made sure to ruin it for me. He ruined my birthday, he ruined my tour, he ruined the Golden Globes. Anything Brianna did for Brianna, he had to ruin it.
So the Golden Globes night was going so great, and I'm sending him pictures and he's happy in the beginning. And then all of a sudden, it turns to like, 'I can't believe you're wearing this.'
"[...] But the cherry on the top of all of that was he reposted that picture of me on his story, and was like, you are so beautiful. While freaking out behind the scenes. Following all of us, and unfollowing me. So like, oh man, it was just such a tug of war with my emotions in my head."
To try to land the plane here on this portion of the story, Brianna expressed embarrassment about how she handled everything, couldn't make sense of why she didn't just leave, and reiterated that she felt severe emotional abuse once those first four months were up.
"It's sad that I did so much for him, but it was never reciprocated. And I also...I want it to be known that I understand people break up and that's OK. This isn't a breakup. I went through a traumatic year of emotional abuse. I got broken up with over the phone. He left, never saw me again, posted it on Instagram, made a Raya, and publicly humiliated me.
Then, called me to say it's all my fault! This isn't me being like I dated a d*****bag that cheated on me at the bar. No. This is something so much deeper than that. So if people want to say the diss track was immature, me talking about it was immature...you know what's f*****g immature? The way you treated me. The f*****g shit that you say, that s**t that you do, the unfollows, this, that. Everything you did was immature. This is simply a reaction to the way that you treat people. That's all this is."
This whole controversy brought to mind something I saw recently about Anna Kendrick. She's a massive movie star and has opened up publicly about how she was in a bad relationship that lasted seven years, but the first six went really well.
The sudden "switch" that Brianna describes is right in line what Kendrick has spoken about, except it happened after she was with her partner for six years.
In lieu of any other way I can figure to stretch this out beyond giant blocks of quotes, I suppose now is as good a time as any to say I have personal experience with this. That is, being on the bad end of a toxic relationship dynamic. So here goes.
Without getting too deep into the specifics of it all, let's just say I made it a point to dive deep into what the hell happened when I finally broke it off. The emotional roller coaster Brianna alluded to of "build you up, beat you down, apologize" was a version of what I went through, except minus the apology bit for the most part.
What Brianna said about craving validation from Bryan, and clinging to who he was in the early "love bombing" phase, really stuck out to me. I learned after the fact that if somebody is manipulating you in this cyclical way, it creates this escalating psychological storm, where one partner is always trying to "fix" things. A fight will start seemingly out nowhere, and the fix-it person will try as hard as they can to reassure them it's OK.
Whether the next step is an outright apology, or just the faintest acknowledgement that everything is "fine", the fix-it person gets a sudden rush of relief that becomes addictive. At least in my situation, I found that the longer it went on, the more concessions I could made, the higher s**t stacked, and the more confused and warped my reality became to the point where, similar to what Brianna was saying, I totally lost track of who I was. Throw in the fact that I was attending a super intense MFA acting program, letting my most vulnerable side and all my emotions spool out in front of people every other day or so, and it got pretty exhausting pretty fast.
At a certain point, once I'd internally trespassed several planets beyond my wit's end -- beyond any reasonable person's maximum capacity for kindness, compassion, and understanding -- I started fighting fire with fire. It only got worse. I don't know how I hung on, but eventually, I ended it. And eventually, I had a better idea of why I did hang on.
It's so great that Brianna has such awesome ride-or-die friends like Dave and Josh who will stand up to a world-famous music artist, essentially beat him at his own game by dropping a straight-fire diss track, and have her back to such an incredible degree.
Zach Bryan is already dropping new music, releasing a song called "High Road" just as this podcast premiered. Maybe he'll share his fuller side of the story at some point, but for Brianna to go public like this and to allegedly turn down an NDA worth twelve million dollars makes me think this isn't any sort of, like, fabricated account of events. I'm not here to put Zach Bryan on digital trial, but a lot of what Brianna said really resonated with me.
In any event, take it from Brianna's personal story, or from some of mine that I just shared here. If you're ever feeling like things are "off" or you're giving way more of yourself to a relationship than your partner is, it's generally better to rip the Band-Aid off and get out as soon as possible, rather than trying to see it through.
But as Brianna kept reiterating through her story, that's very often far easier said than done...