Country star Zach Bryan’s ex accuses him of emotional abuse, claims she was offered $12M to sign NDA
Brianna LaPaglia, who goes by the name Brianna Chickenfry, is accusing her ex, country star Zach Bryan, of emotional abuse during their relationship. She also claims he offered her $12 million to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
During a new episode of the “BFFs” podcast, which she co-hosts with Dave Portnoy and Josh Richards, the internet personality said, “This episode of me not taking the money, like it’s not just for me. It’s for anyone else who’s been emotionally abused, it’s for people right now that are being emotionally abused, it’s for people that don’t have a support system that I was lucky enough to have going through this.”
She continued, “And the last year of my life has been the hardest year of my life, dealing with the abuse from this dude. I’m still scared right now because I’m scared of him still, my brain’s rewired. I’m scared to make him mad.”
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Brianna LaPaglia, who goes by the name Brianna Chickenfry, is accusing her ex, country star Zach Bryan, of emotional abuse during their more-than-a-year relationship and of offering her $12 million to sign a nondisclosure agreement. ( John Shearer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
LaPaglia’s accusations come two weeks after Bryan announced the couple had broken up, apologizing to anyone he had “let down.”
“She has loved me unconditionally for a very long time and for that I’ll always thank her,” he wrote in the October social media post. “I have had an incredibly hard year personally and struggled through some pretty severe things. I thought it would be beneficial for both of us to go our different ways.”
He added, “I am not perfect and never will be.”
Hours after his post, LaPaglia made a YouTube video of herself sitting on her bathroom floor, saying that she had been “blindsided” by Bryan’s breakup post, claiming that he hadn’t told her that he planned to post it and that she had hoped to deal with their split privately.
Brianna LaPaglia previously said she had been “blindsided” by Zach Bryan’s public statement on their breakup. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
She said she couldn’t understand how a person could love somebody “so unconditionally through stuff that you shouldn’t because you just love them, like you see the good in them” and still “be discarded of in a few days.”
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LaPaglia said she didn’t want to go into detail about the breakup yet, because she needed to “heal privately” first.
On Thursday she continued on the podcast, “Last week I didn’t want to talk about it because I was scared, so I was like ‘Yeah, we can just talk about this stuff that’s public,’ and I still said ‘F— your money,’ but you made the women before me believe that they had no other choice than to take money from you, sign their experiences away, sign what they went through away. You get to go skip off and sing your little f—ing songs on stage like you’re a good dude.”
She continued, “I don’t want in two years to buy a f—ing house and think, ‘Oh, this is the money from the dude that literally f—ing destroyed me and broke me for a year?’ F— that, f— you, I don’t want your money.”
During her podcast, Brianna LaPaglia said that Zach Bryan “destroyed me and broke me for a year.” (Zach Bryan/Instagram)
“This isn’t like a drama thing for me,” she added. “This isn’t me not signing the NDA or not taking the money because I want to get on here and expose who he is and his secrets and all that s—. I didn’t take the money because I’m not signing away my experiences and what I went through to protect someone that hurt me, and I’m a lot stronger than a weak man. F— you, f— your money.”
“I’m a lot stronger than a weak man. F— you, f— your money.”
At the beginning of the podcast, they shared a video that LaPaglia filmed of herself a week ago alleging that after the breakup, she had been approached by his team and “offered a lot of money, a big lump sum of money and a few options. Basically, I would have gotten the money over the course of three years, I would have had to sign all of my experiences, everything that I am away to this person. They would have been monitoring everything that I do, and at the end of the three years, I’ll receive like that big lump sum of money.”
She said she thought about taking the money “for a second,” but realized she’s OK on her own and doesn’t want “blood money.”
LaPaglia made it clear she never accepted any money, saying “that’s beneath me.”
Zach Bryan and Brianna LaPaglia photographed kissing at the Grammy Awards in February. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
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But she said she blames herself in many ways for the end of their relationship. “Half the reason this all happened is because I let it . . . I kept showing up when I shouldn’t have, and I kept loving and giving when I shouldn’t have and that came down to, like, that’s a me problem and I think a lot of people do that. If you’re not getting the love that you’re giving, you have to walk away.”
She called it a “blessing,” because she said she didn’t know how long she would have stayed with him otherwise.
She said that after sacrificing her time to go on tour with the “Something in the Orange” singer, he dropped her off in New York so she could do her own tour for a few days, but she said their interaction then felt “abrupt” and “weird.”
She recalled him telling her that after the “hardest year of his life,” he felt that he needed to “sit still” and spend some time at home” instead of going with her, and that made sense to her.
Zach Bryan and Bri LaPaglia, aka ‘Brianna Chickenfry,’ at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards on February 4, 2024. (Getty Images)
Still, they talked every day while she was on tour, and she was “happy,” but then things shifted when he stopped answering her calls and began traveling for other things away from her.
While she was touring, she claimed he had texted her and said, “‘Actually, I can’t do this anymore.’ Out of nowhere.”
She added, “I genuinely think that he needs someone that can be that. That can just be ‘the girl,’ and no one should ever just be ‘the girl,’ and I was so close to just being ‘the girl.’”
“It was just so out of nowhere,” she said of the breakup.
When she returned home from being on tour, she said he told her it was “time to move out” without any discussion, despite the fact that she said that they had talked about marriage and building a life together and even kids.
“I go away for two weeks to give myself a little bit of something, and I come home, and it’s ‘Pack your bags’? I was gutted,” she said.
Brianna LaPaglia at the 58th Academy of Country Music Awards from Ford Center at The Star on May 11, 2023, in Frisco, Texas. (Gilbert Flores/Penske Media via Getty Images)
After she went home, she started to question herself, and he constantly crept into her thoughts in a bad way.
“I don’t think that’s how any relationship should ever be,” she said. “Like, of course, you think about your significant other, but you shouldn’t think about like, ‘Is this going to upset them or is this gonna cause a fight?’ when it’s things that shouldn’t upset people.”
After that, she said he begged her to take him back, and she did, but he never apologized.
“And then we went to Boston for my live show and a lot of horrible s— happened that night and I don’t want to get into any details,” she said, adding that they had talked about working things out, but then he gave her the “cold shoulder,” and he said he was going to go back to Oklahoma.
LaPaglia said she was “blindsided” by Bryan making their breakup public. (Brianna LaPaglia/Instagram)
“Like it was always so hot and cold. I didn’t know what version I was going to get ever,” she explained.
She said that the last time she saw him he refused to give her a hug and accused her of being “dramatic” when she said it felt like the last time they would be together.
“I never had the breakup conversation, I never had like a phone call about what’s going on. I just had argumentative words,” she said, saying that all she wanted was a “kinder goodbye.”
They finally talked about it over text, and she said he told her that going public with the breakup would be on her terms, but hours later she received messages from friends that he had created an account on dating app Raya.
“I don’t think you need Raya, you need therapy,” she said in the video.
LaPaglia went off social media and asked Bryan for a week to heal, but then she was bombarded by his social media post announcing their breakup, which she said he posted because he was “caught” on Raya.
Brianna LaPaglia said she “can’t wait to heal” from her relationship with Zach Bryan. (Christopher Polk/Billboard via Getty Images)
“Everyone in my life found out about the breakup from his Instagram,” she said.
While she never got a proper goodbye, she said she got “his team reaching out to me about settlements and I got him reaching out to me only when Dave [Portnoy] talked about him online.”
“I just can’t wait to move forward and heal from this,” she said, adding, “I don’t want your money, bro.”
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During the podcast, Portnoy said the offer amounted to $12 million in “life-changing money.”
All three co-hosts admitted they went back and forth over whether she should take the money, and Portnoy said they finally agreed, “F— the money, we’re going to war” against Bryan on the podcast, which included a diss track they made about him.
Brianna LaPaglia attends Vanity Fair Campaign Hollywood and TikTok Celebrate Vanities: A Night For Young Hollywood at Mes Amis on March 8, 2023, in Los Angeles, California. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images)
She said that along with the $12 million, which incrementally went up, she was also offered a house or a New York apartment by his team.
“I went through literal narcissistic emotional abuse for a year, and he made me believe everything was my fault,” she claimed. “He isolated me from my whole entire life, he wouldn’t let me be who I wanted to be, he made me hate everything that I loved about myself, he broke me down and then made me feel like he was all I had left, and he just kept repeatedly beating me down.”
She said that when they first started dating he told her, “Women are always trying to ruin my life online” and that people just wanted money from him. “He manipulated the f— out of me,” she claimed, saying that he had been wonderful to her in the first few months of their relationship, and all of a sudden there was a switch. “I don’t know why I stayed.”
She alleged it got to the point where Bryan controlled what she wore and what she posted on social media.
“This isn’t a breakup, like I went through a traumatic year of emotional abuse. . . . This isn’t me being like I dated a douchebag who cheated on me with a girl at the bar, like this is something so much deeper than that,” she continued.
Zach Bryan performs during the Quittin Time tour at Nissan Stadium on June 29, 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee. ( Keith Griner/Getty Images)
LaPaglia said she thought that offering her the money was his “final shot” at still trying to control her and feel like he was a good guy for leaving her with something.
She also discussed several times that his anger allegedly got out of control, including a birthday party at which she claimed he lashed out at her friends for no reason. Her aunt attempted to calm him down, and LaPaglia claimed he smashed some glass.
She also claimed he broke her phone, telling her co-hosts, “Look at my phone, it’s smashed from him, he’s always smashed my phone.”
Bryan hasn’t responded to LaPaglia’s accusations, though he did share posts on his Instagram promoting his new song, “High Road,” with lyrics like “Everyone is tellin’ me that I need help or therapy / But all I need is to be left alone.”
Zach Bryan performs in support of his “The Quittin Time Tour 2024” at Ford Field on June 20, 2024, in Detroit, Michigan. (Scott Legato/Getty Images)
He also posted a link to a post by author Jack Kerouac’s estate – a photo of the late writer with the quote: “I didn’t know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.”
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Fox News Digital has reached out to Bryan’s reps for comment.
