Trisha Paytas shared her complicated feelings about the cheating scandal involving her former Frenemies co-host Ethan Klein and his wife (and Paytas’ sister-in-law), Hila Klein. Last week, Hila accused Ethan of having a more than six-month-long affair
with an unnamed person; following the revelation, Ethan confirmed that he is working to extricate himself from the podcast they hosted together, H3.
Speaking on her own show, Just Trish, Paytas said, “I hate to say that I felt… like, I just kind of felt relief that maybe it’s over when he announced the podcast was over.” (H3 is currently on an indefinite hiatus.)
“It just felt like relief, and that makes me really sad,” she continued. “I’m ashamed to say that, because it’s an awful situation, the way that had to end. But I’ve been praying, truly, truly every day for the past five years for it just to end.”
Paytas’ connection to the Kleins is multi-faceted. Both Paytas and Ethan are legacy YouTubers, and despite having a somewhat contentious relationship, they started the popular podcast Frenemies in 2020. The show was a hit, but it abruptly and mysteriously ended in 2021 after about nine months. While Paytas has been reluctant to speak about the specifics of the fallout, she has been open about the emotional toll it took on her.
On top of all that, Paytas’ husband, Moses Hacmon, is Hila’s brother. Hacmon and Hila have been estranged for about five years.
To that end, Paytas acknowledged that, after news of the cheating scandal broke, she saw plenty of people who’d been “wronged by Ethan” celebrating the revelation. But, she stated, “I don’t feel that way about it, obviously, because it’s Moses’ family. We also have kids the same age. And obviously with Moses’ family, too, there’s just sensitivity involved, of course.”
Hacmon, for his part, also appeared on Just Trish to discuss the matter, having previously avoided speaking publicly about Ethan and Hila. After revealing that he’d gone “no contact” with the two, Hacmon said he could not say anything specifically about Hila because they hadn’t seen each other in about five years. But of Ethan, he pointedly stated, “Ethan to me is not part of the family anymore, so I can definitely talk about it.”
Hacmon accused Ethan of “doing 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 was successful at that, too.”
Still, Hacmon said when he read his sister’s statement, he was “in tears.” He added, “I warned her in the past that he’s a liar and he lies, and I don’t expect her to choose her brother over her husband. I understand she had to stay and do what she needed to do. But at this point, the lies have just got to a point where it literally destroyed him and his family.”
Paytas is expected to reveal more about Ethan and what happened with Frenemies in her new memoir, which will be published in November. The book, of course, was written before she knew about Ethan’s alleged infidelities and, on Just Trish, Paytas added that she’d already done some press for the book in which she discussed Ethan before learning about the allegations.
Still, of her long feud with Ethan, she said, “I feel like I’m pretty healed and we got through the storm that was what we dealt with for the past five years. Barely, because just this past year things were still brought up, and I was just like, ‘It’s never gonna end.’ So it feels like the end to this harassment.”
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