Highlights
- Rodgers used Cam Heyward’s podcast to call his ex Danica Patrick depressed and not fun to be around.
- He claims Shailene Woodley asked to sleep with another man days after accepting his December proposal.
- He says he met wife Brittani in 2017 and was emotionally unavailable through both later relationships.
I’ll search for the latest on this. Aaron Rodgers just detonated four years of silence on a teammate’s podcast, and both of his famous exes are collateral damage.
The 42-year-old Steelers quarterback sat for a two-part sit-down with Cam Heyward on Not Just Football, Part 2 (watch below), which dropped on Thursday, September 10. He came armed with dates, receipts, and zero interest in being gracious.
Danica Patrick got it first. “She was depressed and not fun to be around,” Rodgers said of the retired racer, adding that he stuck around anyway, trying to be a good partner. Then came the domestic autopsy: “There was no intimacy. There was nothing.” He says she floated the idea of buying the Malibu house together. He says he declined.
Context: Patrick told Sage Steele last year that the 2020 split was the most painful thing she’s lived through, describing the relationship as emotionally abusive and saying “he leaves a trail of blood.” Rodgers has clearly been chewing on that line ever since. “I was actually a good partner, Danica,” he shot back, before insisting he never saw a long-term future.
Then he pivoted to Shailene Woodley, and somehow escalated.
Rodgers says he proposed in December 2020 and she said yes. “She could have said no,” he noted, which is a sentence that tells on itself. Days later, he claims, she told him: “before we get married, I gotta go f*** this guy.”
He didn’t name the guy. Woodley hasn’t said a word.
What he really wants dismantled is the breakup narrative. “Her story is that I ruined her life and caused her depression, he said, before flipping the timeline: the ring came off by March 2021, there were failed reconciliation attempts, and “there wasn’t even a relationship in 2022 to break off.” His summation, delivered directly to an absent ex-fiancée: “Shai, you left me, you took the ring off.”
Woodley has described that stretch as the “darkest, hardest time in my life,” an eight-month “pain bubble” she spent filming in a New York winter. She later called the relationship “beautiful and toxic.” Rodgers is arguing the villain casting was fraudulent from the jump.
The origin story he offers as his defense is the wildest part. He met his now-wife Brittani in 2017, before Patrick, before Woodley. She left for Europe. “My biggest regret is not begging her to stay” or proposing on the spot, he said. The fallout: “I was emotionally unavailable for those seven or eight years.”
Translated: he was in love with someone else the entire time, and the women who dated him got the leftovers.
He’s still furious about the reputation that followed. “even his family hates him” is the version he says has chased him for years. He also alleged past partners leaked his address and pushed him into Instagram posts, insisting, “I never really wanted to live a public life.”
Said on a podcast. About two named women. In the first week of the season.
The timing on Woodley is especially ugly. She won her first Emmy on September 6 for Hulu’s Paradise — four days before Rodgers turned her private life into content.
