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Trisha Paytas is breaking her silence on fellow YouTuber Ethan Klein‘s scandal.
For those unaware, Trisha is related to the (now former) H3 host Ethan and his wife Hila Klein through Trish’s husband, Moses Hacmon. Moses is Hila’s brother.
Over the years, as YouTube personalities, Trisha and Ethan had developed a “frenemies” dynamic and capitalized on it by starting the Frenemies podcast in 2020. Unfortunately, the “frenemies” thing quickly turned into actual “enemies” territory, reportedly over creative ownership arguments, and their podcast quickly ended in 2021. Ever since they’ve been on bad terms, even going no contact.
Last week, unrelated to their feud, Hila released the following statement on Instagram claiming she had discovered Ethan had been cheating on her for months:
“I am living in a nightmare I can’t wake up from.
My husband has been having an affair.
I have been fed lie after lie after lie for months. I am tired of lies. Here is the truth.
I could sense something was wrong. I tried to ask him questions and share my concerns and hurt feelings. But I was met with dismissive answers and no action. Things that bothered me continued to bother me, and he did nothing about it.
So I trusted him. Because I loved him. I stopped questioning him and began to question myself, my own instincts. My sanity.”
But Hila says the truth eventually found its way to the surface:
“Eventually, he was caught in a lie, and I knew I was done. But the lies continued. “It was just a kiss” became “it was emotional cheating.” After I dragged these lies from him, he finally admitted he’d been in an affair for over 6 months, the extent of which I’m sure I still don’t know.
The betrayal I feel is immeasurable. The person I loved and trusted for 20 years evaporated overnight. He was my safe place, my partner in marriage, parenting, and business. My only family on this side of the world. How do I even begin to make sense of this?
I don’t know what comes next; I’ve never been here before. I am in survival mode, trying to navigate separation, co-parenting, and unthinkable heartbreak. All I can do right now is focus on taking care of myself and my children, one day at a time.”
See the full post below:
Since then Ethan has released his own statement via Instagram Stories, writing:
“I know a lot of people are understandably looking for a comment from me, but I ask that you please respect my family’s privacy and do not contact them looking for me or asking for their comments. They have nothing to do with this and share in your outrage and disappointment. Thank you.”
He then uploaded another statement letting everyone know he was working to remove himself from the ownership of their podcast and other business ventures:
“I am working with Hila to urgently remove my ownership and financial stakes in any podcasts, Teddy Fresh, Teddy Glow or any joint venture that I would profit from. All of your support will go directly to Hila and the crew. I do this in the hope that people can still support Hila and the Crew without the concern of enriching me.
I know the crew will make an awesome show, they are packed to the brim with the most talented, creative, hilarious and all around great people.”
Now that it’s been a few days since this all erupted, Trisha is speaking out.
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On the Tuesday episode of her Just Trish podcast, she starts by prefacing how hard it is to even discuss them as she’s still struggling with the fear she’s felt from the feud:
“So this is, like, a little bit of a hard transition, and obviously really, really hard to talk about, and obviously it’s very sensitive. It’s Moses’s family. It’s a hard boundary we’ve drawn for literally the past 5 years to never, ever mention Ethan and Hila. Obviously, I went through a really dark time in 2021, a really awful psychosis that was definitely the most, like, altering thing for my brain to go through. It was really, really difficult. And I think from that time I was like, ‘I cannot engage anymore and talk about them anymore.’ And it was just really hard, and it was hard for both me and Moses, obviously. So we kind of made that decision together, for my own mental health.”
She claims she pleaded with Ethan for a truce, citing her mental health concerns:
“I sent private texts, and I was just like, ‘Please, please, like, I am, like, spiraling. I’m mentally unwell. Like, can we just end this?’ And I was met with, like, zero grace or compassion from either of them. And they said, ‘We’ll never stop. You don’t get to tell us what to do.’ And ever since then I realized, like, it will never stop. And, oh my gosh, it’s really hard. I stopped not out of fear of them, although it’s been living in fear for the past, like, 5 years, just always worried about them talking about us at any given time. And because we made that decision and to set the boundary to not talk about them, we could never defend ourselves. There was just no point. It was from the end of Frenemies. It was just lies, and nobody wanted to hear from me. Nobody wanted to believe me. I’ve been just ridiculed for the past 5 years about everything.”
Then she starts opening up about the cheating scandal specifically, saying:
“Everything that’s happened in the past, you know, 72 hours, or whatever. It’s hard. It’s hard to talk about. I see a lot of people that were wronged by Ethan, you know, obviously, like, celebrating, rejoicing. I don’t feel that way about it, obviously, because it’s, again, it’s Moses’s family. We also have kids the same age. Like, I couldn’t imagine.”
That said, while she’s definitely not celebrating the breakup of their family, she does say she finally feels something like relief since he’ll no longer be hosting that podcast:
“I just kind of felt relief that maybe it’s over. When he announced the podcast was over, I just felt, like, relief, and that makes me really sad, and I’m really ashamed to say that, because it’s an awful situation, like, the way that that had to end.”
Trisha’s husband Moses then spoke about his feelings about it all, having never publicly opened up about the family rift before this. He tells their listeners:
“I made a decision to never talk about family for, you know, I don’t know, for drama, for views, for whatever it is that they were doing. And, for me it was, like, I chose to go no contact with them and the rest of the family because of that, because I was like, ‘Okay, I know what I’m not going to do, but I can’t control what they’re doing, and it’s hurting my wife. It’s hurting my children.’ Stuff that’s being said are, like, blatant lies that people just believe and run with, even now, you know, even now with all of this. People are still, like, in the comments repeating lies that were said. So yeah, I’ve been no contact with Hila for, like, five years. So I have nothing to say about her. But Ethan, to me, is not part of the family anymore. So I can definitely talk about it. And at first he did everything he could to destroy my family, and he was successful at that, unfortunately. And after that he did everything he could to destroy his own family, and he was successful at that too.”
Describing how he felt when he read Hila’s statement, he admits he became emotional:
“I was in tears because I read the statement from my sister, and, you know, it’s, like, even though I don’t talk to her, I don’t hate anyone, and I don’t—you know, I understand where people come from, understand why people do what they do, and it’s unfortunate, but I understand. You know, it’s my youngest sister. We were very close, and when I read the statement I felt the pain, and it was very, very painful to read and to find out what was happening. I warned her in the past that he’s a liar and he lies.”
He continued:
“So, obviously, something was about to happen, and instead of doing the right thing, he did it the wrong way all the way and got to a point where all of it was just out online for everyone to see, and it’s painful to see.”
Truly a rough, horrible situation for everyone involved.
You can watch Trisha’s podcast episode in full for more below (starting at the 1:32:54 timestamp):
Wishing them all healing as they move forward from this.
[Image via YouTube/Trisha Paytas/MEGA/WENN]