What’s Going On With Brianna Chickenfry and Zach Bryan?

If the name Brianna Chickenfry mysteriously entered your lexicon this month, you’re not alone. Though the 25-year-old influencer and podcaster is well-known in the Barstool Sports universe (and close buddies with Dave Portnoy), she’s been making headlines following her breakup from country singer Zach Bryan. Even the NHL’s Boston Bruins have picked a side (Team Brianna). But since LaPaglia (Brianna’s real last name) alleged Bryan emotionally abused her throughout their relationship — and made a bombshell claim that she’d refused a $12 million NDA from her ex — she’s garnered widespread support for speaking out. The breakup is still unfolding — messily, might I add — and we’re here to answer all your questions.

Wait, who’s Brianna Chickenfry?

Chickenfry, whose real last name is LaPaglia, is an influencer and podcaster. She currently hosts the podcast PlanBri Uncut Barstool Sports and co-hosts the BFFs Podcast alongside Portnoy and Josh Richards. Per “Page Six,” the Boston native had been attending Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio as a pre-med student, while posting comedic videos about her drunken debauchery and subsequent hangovers online. After going viral a few times, she says Barstool DM’d her to offer her an internship, and she dropped out to pursue the gig full time. She’s previously described Barstool as Boston’s “Mecca.” “Dave Portnoy’s God where I’m from,” she said in an interview with Joe Vulpis last year. As for the fake name? She made a viral Vine about her leg looking like a Burger King chicken fry, and it stuck.

Okay, and who’s Zach Bryan?

Not to be confused with his fellow white country singer, Luke Bryan, Zach Bryan is a 28-year-old musician. He crossed over into wider public appeal with his fourth studio album, Zach Bryan, in 2023, later winning his first Grammy for the Kacey Musgraves duet “I Remember Everything.” Talents aside, the man has no shortage of controversies to his name. Bryan made it onto the Swifties’ shit list earlier this year after drunkenly tweeting that Kanye West was better than Taylor Swift. He’s since apologized, but Swift’s fans still think he lifted some of his songs from their monarch’s repertoire. And while Bryan has said he doesn’t support Donald Trump, he did call the former president’s post-assassination attempt fist bump “sick, dude.” He was also previously married to a woman named Rose Madden, whom he met while serving in the U.S. Navy.

Why did Brianna Chickenfry and Zach Bryan break up?

That depends on who you ask. According to Bryan, the couple broke up “with each other” after about a year of dating, which he explained in a dramatic breakup announcement in an Instagram story in October. “I have had an incredibly hard year personally and struggled through some pretty severe things,” he wrote. “I thought it would be beneficial for both of us to go our different ways.”

According to LaPaglia’s version of things, Bryan made the news of their split public without giving her a heads-up. “I wanted to just, like, be hurt for a week and, like, lay in bed, you know?” LaPaglia said in a teary YouTube video titled, “Love you guys, I’ll be back soon.” In her own Instagram Story, she wrote that she was “feeling really blindsided right now” and would be taking a break from social media to “attempt to heal privately.”

But an Us Weekly report suggested the breakup may have been a little more nefarious, with an anonymous source alleging that Bryan had created a profile on the dating app Raya and was “dating around while … in a committed relationship.” The source noted that Bryan had denied cheating on LaPaglia, but it certainly didn’t help that Reddit users claimed to have receipts. “Someone sent [LaPaglia] Zach’s Raya profile and girls were reaching out about him dating around,” the source said. “They had just moved in together in the spring, and she changed her whole life to accommodate his … She’s devastated.”

Later addressing the cheating rumors, LaPaglia said on the BFFs podcast, “I don’t think you need Raya, I think you need therapy.”

LaPaglia claims Bryan offered her $12 million to sign an NDA to keep silent about their relationship.

Weeks after going public with their contentious breakup, LaPaglia accused Bryan of emotional abuse throughout their year-long relationship. On a November episode of the BFFs Podcast, she told cohosts Portnoy and Richards that she had endured the hardest year of her life “dealing with the abuse from this dude.” LaPaglia then alleged that Bryan had a habit of handing out NDAs to the women he dates, claiming he offered her $12 million and a New York apartment in exchange for her silence about their relationship. “I’m still scared right now because I’m scared of him,” LaPaglia said. “My brain’s rewired and I’m scared to make him mad.”

Over the course of an hour-long episode, LaPaglia characterized the alleged abuse as a cycle of “build you up, beat you down, apologize over and over.” She said Bryan frequently screamed at her before switching tunes and begging for forgiveness — something she cried herself to sleep over “every night.” As for the NDA she claims Bryan offered her, LaPaglia says she refused to sign any paperwork or accept his money. “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. Fuck you, and fuck your money.”

“You get to go skip off and sing your little fucking songs onstage like you’re a good dude. You get to treat people around you like shit,” she added. “Sorry, I’m not them. I don’t want your money. I don’t want in two years to buy a fucking house and think, Oh, this is the money from the dude that literally fucking destroyed me and broke me for a year.”

LaPaglia also said the singer “tried to control” what she wore and posted online, pointing to a corseted gold dress she wore to the Golden Globes in January. “That was fucking crazy … He said he didn’t want to date someone that presents themselves that way, and he unfollowed me,” she said. “He ruined my night. Everything good, anything good I did for me, he made sure to ruin it for me.”

Elsewhere in the episode, LaPaglia reiterated that she wasn’t coming forward for exposure or to take Bryan down, but “for anyone else that’s been emotionally abused and for people right now being emotionally abused.”

In another TikTok dispatch posted to her burner account, LaPaglia said she’d lost weight due to extreme stress and said she’d been feeling “physically sick” from being in a constant state of fight or flight. LaPaglia also confessed she’d been living at her mom’s house for fear of running into Bryan’s fans on the street.

“I’m scared to go back to New York. I’m scared to go out in public because I’m scared one of Zach’s fans on the street is going to be like ‘Team Zach’ and say something to me about it,” she said. “I don’t care if people listen to his music or go to his concerts or whatever — but, like, people saying that stuff to me, they don’t understand the weight of that.”

A month after the warring breakup posts, LaPaglia appears to have gotten her mojo back — though she certainly seems committed to stirring the pot. She says she was recently approved for a New York condo, has been going out with her friends again, and recently posted a TikTok of her and “some good pals” drinking Tito’s at sunrise. As commenters pointed out, one of the “good pals” seemed to be getting awfully cozy with LaPaglia. When one user suggested the influencer might be moving on a little too “fast,” she responded: “Well I was cheated on my whole relationship so yeah.”

LaPaglia claims she has footage of Bryan “whipping shit at my face” in a since-deleted TikTok.

Things between LaPaglia and Bryan escalated further amid an apparent custody battle over the former couple’s shared cat, Stump. Last week, the podcaster claimed in a TikTok that Bryan stole Stump from her. “I miss Stump so much. I wanna fucking kidnap him,” she said. “But when [Bryan] left and didn’t tell me anything, he took Stump out of spite. He didn’t even like cats. [Bryan’s dog] Jack hates cats.”

Frustrated with Bryan repeatedly posting photos of Stump on Instagram, LaPaglia threatened the singer in a since-deleted November TikTok video. Per “Page Six,” the 25-year-old said that if “this man” — seemingly referring to Bryan — “posts this fucking cat one more time,” she would release footage of him “whipping shit at my face.” According to TMZ, when Portnoy commented on the TikTok encouraging her to post the videos, she responded: “I’ll just send to u.”

Has Bryan responded to the allegations?

Officially? No. But hours after LaPaglia went public with her allegations, the singer reposted an image of the writer Jack Kerouac to his Instagram Story. “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,” the caption reads, quoting Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road. Shortly after, Bryan posted a glamour shot of a horse. The same week, he dropped two new songs — “This World’s a Giant” and “High Road” — and posted a babbling caption on Instagram about his songwriting process and the year and a half he’d spent on the road touring.

A week after airing her initial allegations, LaPaglia told listeners of the BFFs Podcast that Bryan’s silence was “deafening.” “I obviously think he’s not responding because if he is to respond, he has to deny it … and then I post all the videos and the recordings,” she said.

Why is Dave Portnoy involved in this?

LaPaglia’s co-host and all-around nuisance Dave Portnoy has been actively trolling Bryan on X, dedicating Taylor Swift’s “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” to the singer. Portnoy has also dropped two separate diss tracks in LaPaglia’s honor — yes, two — one of them titled “Country Diddy,” an apparent reference to Bryan. (It’s worth noting that Portnoy has also been accused of sexual misconduct by several women, allegations he has repeatedly denied.) According to the tabloid, LaPaglia called the latest track “lethal” on her Instagram Stories. “Holy shit,” she wrote. “I just heard this for the first time. Dave made another song because Warner kept removing his … Everyone needs a Dave song.”

The Cut has reached out to Bryan for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

This post has been updated.