Zach Bryan’s Ex Brianna ‘Chickenfry’ LaPaglia Alleges Abuse

Two weeks after Zach Bryan announced his divorce from Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia, the podcast host is opening up about their relationship.

On Thursday’s episode of Barstool Sports’ “BFFs” podcast, LaPaglia detailed Bryan’s alleged “narcissistic emotional abuse,” as well as her decision to turn down a $12 million non-disclosure agreement offered by his team — which she called “his last chance to still control me to keep’.

“This isn’t about drama to me,” LaPaglia told co-hosts Dave Portnoy and Josh Richards. “This episode and I’m not taking the money, it’s not just for me. It is for anyone who has been emotionally abused.

“I’m still scared now because I’m scared of him,” she continued. “My brain has been rewired and I’m afraid of making him angry.”

Representatives for Bryan did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment on Friday.

Bryan last month confirmed his break 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 “truly blindsided” and shared plans to “step off social media for a while and try to heal privately.”

“I just wanted to process my breakup privately,” she said at the top of Thursday’s podcast episode. “But that was taken from me, so here we are.”

While she was away from her That’s my best friends tour in September, LaPaglia said, Bryan abruptly switched from talking about their future together to saying, “I can’t do this anymore.” In her tour documentaryshe said, “You can see the life slowly disappearing from my eyes.”

A “crazy cycle” followed, LaPaglia said, with Bryan lashing out and then begging her to stay. One morning, she said, he told her he was going back to Oklahoma: “I knew that would be the last time I saw him.”

LaPaglia said she didn’t tell her family about the split before Bryan posted about it. “Everyone in my life heard about my breakup through their Instagram story.”

Then it was Bryan’s crickets and one settlement offer after another from his team, she said. The final offer was $12 million – what Portnoy called “life-changing money.”

LaPaglia said she refused to be like women who believed “they had no choice but to take money from you, write down their experiences, draw what they went through.”

Although LaPaglia claimed her goal with the episode was not to nitpick “everything he’s ever done” but to “stand up for other survivors,” she recalled a few 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 her friends. When she refused to quit her Barstool gig, he offered to pay her double her salary, telling her she was “destined for so much more.”

“I was made to hate so many things about myself that I want to love,” LaPaglia said. “Everything that was good, everything I did for me, he made sure to ruin it for me.”

“Why did I stay?” she added. “There is no answer.”

The episode ‘BFFs’ comes after Portnoy and Richards have a diss track targeting Bryan, which they said his team has repeatedly tried to suppress through legal means. But thanks to Barstool’s reach on social media, Richards says, “it’s still getting millions of views.”

“If people want to say, ‘The diss track was immature, me what I was talking about (Bryan) was immature,’” LaPaglia said at the end of the podcast. “You know what immature is?”

“The way you treated me,” she told 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’ Instagram.

The singer said that when he returned home to Oklahoma, he visited his mother’s grave and “told her that I was quitting touring because I was accepted to get my master’s degree in Paris next year.” (Country music magazine Shout later reported that Bryan’s master’s program is in Paris, France.)

Within hours of Bryan’s post, LaPaglia wrote about her Instagram story that she “can’t believe how many women and men have experienced the same abuse. You have me, I will always be a voice for all of you.

“This is all two weeks later, so I’m still processing everything I’ve been through. I will continue to process and heal with all of you!” she wrote. “Morale > 12 million.”