Brianna Chickenfry Spills On Zach Bryan & Grace O’Malley Drama Including A $17M NDA & ‘Evil’ Ex-Bestie
Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia has officially entered her Reputation era, except instead of a surprise album, it’s a two-hour Impaulsive sit-down where she talks NDAs, “bad guy” exes and ex-besties like she’s clearing out emotional storage. If you’ve lost track of the lore, fair — here’s all the updates we got on her villain origin story.
Quick refresher on the Zach Bryan and Brianna LaPaglia mess
Brianna and country star Zach Bryan started dating in 2023 and split in October 2024, right as fans noticed she was suddenly MIA from Grace O’Malley’s birthday content and PlanBri Uncut started feeling… tense.
Not long after the breakup, Brianna alleged on BFFs that Zach was emotionally abusive and that his team offered her a reported $12 million ($17 million AUD) NDA, plus property, to stop her talking about the relationship. She said she refused, explaining she wasn’t going to “sign away” her experiences, and later kept hinting at a so-called “fire pit recording” from a night where he allegedly screamed “horrible shit” at her friends.
Fast forward: Zach goes public with Samantha Leonard in mid-2025, marries her in Spain five months later, releases diss tracks that sure sound like they’re about Bri, and Brianna is on now on a podcast, other than her own, spilling her truth like a woman who has discovered the healing power of petty.
What Brianna LaPaglia revealed about Zach Bryan (and that NDA)
On Impaulsive, Brianna doubled down on how extreme that NDA felt. She told Logan Paul and Mike Majlak she “couldn’t be on social media” if she signed it and said, “I wouldn’t have been able to do my job… It was out of the question. It was so controlling.” She also claimed the deal was so broad it roped in “all of Barstool” and even her BFFs co-hosts Josh Richards and Dave Portnoy.
When Logan said he didn’t get why Zach would want “that level of control post-relationship,” Brianna didn’t bother softening the language, calling him “a psychopath, a narcissist and a very scary person.” She also called his marriage to Samantha Leonard a “dig” at her, saying that before her, “no one… ever looked like me” and linking the whole “you dated a girl who looks like your ex” thing to what she described as narcissistic behaviour.
She still found time for some lighter (but still sharp) jabs, joking about Zach “jump[ing] over a fence” during a chaotic altercation with country singer Gavin Adcock and saying the clip “made me so happy” and was “awesome.” On his music, she claimed, “I bet if you guys tried, you could sing as good as he did… People are really gifted with singing. He’s not that gifted. I’m just being objective.”
How Grace O’Malley got dragged into it
The other half of the interview was basically a post-mortem on her friendship with Grace O’Malley, her childhood best friend and former PlanBri co-host. When Mike Majlak brought up all her recent “beefs”, Brianna insisted, “It’s not even a beef. It’s an internet beef that they created.” But asked straight-up if she and Grace are still friends, she replied, “No, we’re not friends. We’ll never be friends again.”
Brianna said the fallout started while she was in the relationship with “bad guy” (Zach), claiming Grace “didn’t like” him and that their PlanBri fans were “really bullying” her for dating him or being a “bad friend.” She alleged she begged Grace to say something publicly, but was told “it doesn’t matter,” even as Grace reassured her in private that she was her “best friend.”
According to Bri, it felt like Grace was happy to be painted as the sainted bestie while Brianna took all the heat: “Because she was getting lifted up and she liked that.” She said she eventually ended the podcast before she ended the relationship, describing how it all “snowballed and spiraled” from there and accusing Grace of then icing out anyone in New York who still spoke to her. In one of the harshest lines of the episode, Brianna said, “She’s evil. It’s very dark and weird. And I’ve never said that out loud.”
Grace, for her part, has been a lot more diplomatic publicly, telling another podcast she still cares about Brianna and hopes they can work things out one day, even as she moved on to her own projects away from Barstool.
At the end of it all, though, Brianna made it clear she’s not sitting in the wreckage of her twenties crying over a country singer and a dead podcast feed. She revealed she’s dating again and genuinely feels good about the choices she’s made and the boundaries she’s set.
