It’s been a rough few weeks for Ethan Klein. The cohost of The H3 Podcast made headlines in October after his wife and podcast co-host Hila Klein dropped bombshell news accusing him of having a six-month-long affair. “I am living in a nightmare I can’t wake up from,” she wrote on Instagram. “My husband has been having an affair. I have been fed lie after lie after lie for months. I am tired of lies.”
Now, the release of a memoir from his other former podcast cohost, Trisha Paytas, probably isn’t going to help.
Out today, Crying on the Kitchen Floor is a sprawling memoir, starting with Paytas’ birth in Riverside, California, and encompassing her early attempts at YouTube virality, sex work, and multi-faceted career as an online troll. But it’s also her first no-holds-barred recollection of the fallout of her podcast Frenemies, which she made with now-ousted H3 host Klein. (Paytas is married to Moses Hacmon — Hila’s brother — a marriage that complicated her already complex relationships with Klein.) In the book, Paytas says the Frenemies split started as a miscommunication and led to Klein waging all-out war against her — all in an effort to make more money. (Klein did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.)
After the allegations of infidelity broke online, the crew of The H3 Podcast released a statement saying they were “shocked, angry, and heartbroken,” and announced they would no longer work with Klein, placing the podcast on an indefinite hiatus. Klein, 41, did not outright confirm the allegation but announced he would “remove [his] ownership” from H3 and all its associated podcasts and projects. “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,” Klein said. “They have nothing to do with this and share in your outrage and disappointment.”
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Timing is everything. When the news first dropped, Paytas said she was “relieved” that H3 was finally over. But in Crying on the Kitchen Floor, Paytas gives her unbarred thoughts about her initial thoughts of Klein and why her own podcast with him came to an abrupt end.
“I’d believed that, no matter what superficial conflicts Ethan and I got into, at the end of the day, we were genuinely friends. I cared for him. I thought he cared for me too,” Paytas writes. “Maybe I should have known that as soon as I was no longer useful, Ethan would drop me. What I never expected was that he and Hila would try to destroy me.”
Paytas first appeared on H3 in 2019 as a guest. At the time, she was a legacy fixture on YouTube, but had struggled to solidify a steady following. Mostly, she used her social media accounts to troll other internet celebrities, discuss her work as a stripper and a sex worker, and promote her OnlyFans. In a past episode, Klein had dismissed her content as annoying, but fans responded well to her appearance. Paytas felt good about the invite, but less than impressed with their setup.
“Though the set itself was giving Howard Stern chic, the rest of the office felt very haphazard and amateurish, like a bunch of dudes were just pretending to run a media company. Which, as it turned out, wasn’t far from the truth,” she writes. “Ethan and I weren’t going to be best friends, but I recognized him as a kind of kindred spirit. At this core, he was a troll. He stirred the pot.”
His team contacted her again when they wanted to make a new podcast with a female co-host. In September 2020, Frenemies was born. It was a weekly podcast where Paytas and Klein could talk rapid-fire about any cultural topic that came to mind, but mostly riffed on their often-contentious relationship. When Paytas signed onto the show, she agreed to a 55-45 revenue split on the main episodes and sponsors, allowing Klein to keep all the revenue on the H3 highlights channel. At the height of the series, Paytas writes that she was making $180,000 a month. But the highlights channel was making almost four times the podcast revenue — and Paytas claims she didn’t see a dollar.
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Things came to a head nine months into the show, when the two filmed the 39th episode. In the now infamous recording — which is still up on YouTube — Paytas and Klein start their usual sparring but it got out of hand. Paytas asked to stop filming, verging on tears, and accused Klein of “gaslighting” her over money.
In Crying on the Kitchen Floor, Paytas writes that she left the recording feeling overwhelmed, but assumed that she and Klein would work it out. When she posted on her Instagram that she was “stepping away” from Frenemies, she says, it was a joke. But she was shocked when Klein went live and blamed Paytas for the show’s problems — including a claim that she had attempted to get the crew fired, which she writes is entirely false. Ethan’s videos started a tidal wave of harassment against Paytas, which, she writes, triggered a mental health crisis that left her despondent and spiraling. But when the two managed to film a final episode of Frenemies, one Paytas describes as a “beautiful experience”; Klein refused to release it.
“Even though Ethan and I had been attacking each other like rabid dogs for the better part of three weeks, when we sat down for one final rodeo in the Frenemies studio, we were able to talk more as friends than enemies,” she writes. “After that last closure episode, we’d been so close to being okay. We’d squashed the beef but for some reason, a few days after recording, Ethan said he wasn’t going to release it. It seemed more likely to me that the real reason Ethan didn’t want to release the episode was because he realized keeping the beef going was better for business.”
Paytas writes that after recovering from the split, she’s now focused on living a better, less reactive life, for her husband and three children. “Ethan could only affect me if I let him,” she writes. “And goddamnit, I couldn’t give him that power anymore. Not if I wanted this life to be my own.”
