After Ariel Fulmer’s life collapsed, she hopped out of her husband’s car and walked around a New Jersey airport with no sense of direction.
“The aftermath of that was messy,” Ariel tells Rolling Stone. “I was sitting in the airport waiting for a flight that was [almost] six hours later, so I walked into Brooks Brothers and I bought myself an expensive suit jacket. I was like, ‘I deserve it.’ And I distinctly remember, this woman in the airport bathroom looked at me and goes, ‘Sharp jacket.’ And I was like, “Thanks, my husband cheated on me.’”
The husband in question? Ned Fulmer, one fourth of viral YouTube sensation the Try Guys. In 2022, a combination of fan sleuthing and online drama publicly revealed that Ned was having an extramarital affair with a Try Guys producer. The news went viral, in part because Ned’s role in the YouTube was as a self-proclaimed wife guy, someone who never went long without mentioning Ariel, their two children (now aged seven and five), and their years-long marriage. Seemingly overnight, everyone knew Ned was a cheater. The Try Guys announced Ned would no longer be a part of the group. (Both Ned and Ariel declined to speak specifically about their time with the Try Guys or current relationships with any members. Eugene Lang, another member, has since left the group, and founding members Keith Habsberger and Zach Kornfeld have expanded the channel to include multiple recurring cast members.) The scandal was splashed across front pages, and even parodied on Saturday Night Live. But for Ariel, who found out alongside the internet, the shock of a such a private pain being turned into national entertainment sent her into a fugue state of disbelief, one that saw her meandering through the halls of an empty airport with an expensive and entirely unnecessary suit jacket, the wreck of her marriage fresh on her mind.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard that story,” Ned tells Rolling Stone on a joint Zoom call. “I mean,” Ariel says, looking at him with a smile, “Why would I tell you?”
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Now, three years after the cheating scandal that ended their marriage, Ned is returning back to the spotlight with a new podcast, Rock Bottom. The show features people discussing their worst moments in life. And to answer everyone’s questions about Ned’s own rock bottom, the first episode features a frank conversation with Ariel. (The two are now separated.) In the hour-long episode, which premiered Wednesday but was filmed in early spring, the two work through the emotions of having their private separation become the internet’s topic of the week. The two are no longer together, though they say they interact as friendly co-parents. Ariel is content to leave content behind, wanting instead to focus on her rediscovered love of ceramics. But Ned can’t seem to leave creation in the rearview. So with the space to look at it from a new perspective, he’s admitting something the internet is desperate to hear. Ned says his cancellation wasn’t just justified. It was necessary.
“There’s an implication with cancel culture that the reaction was overblown,” he tells Rolling Stone. “But I feel like it was totally justified. What people were saying was just a reflection of everything I was experiencing interpersonally. I get it. I really fucked up.”
Ned and Ariel spoke exclusively with Rolling Stone in a joint interview about the cheating scandal that tore their marriage and public lives apart, being parents in the digital age, and what a future looks like when forgiveness is off the table.
You guys have been dealing with the fallout of this cheating scandal for three years. So why a podcast to finally break the ice? And why now?
Ariel: To be completely honest, Ned didn’t even ask me to do it. It was the sort of situation where I knew that he wanted to go back online. I don’t even remember whose idea it was, but we were having a conversation and I went, “Well what if I went on your podcast? And what if we talked about us?” Ned thought about it a little bit and he was like, “Well, I mean, I guess. If you want to break the internet.”
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Ned: Yeah, it’s very tough when we’ve moved on as a couple.
Ariel: Well, not as a couple
Ned: Right. But everyone else is stuck in the past, and that kind of makes you feel stuck in the past. And I think we felt that in order to move on into any future project, we were ready to just take that step, to share our story and then move on.
Other than getting people to move on, what did you think you would gain from joining the podcast, Ariel?
Ariel: The things that we talk about on the podcast are things that we have shared with our with our very close friends, and they are things that we that we feel that we feel could also be helpful to people out there that maybe are going through difficult times as well. Specifically my story. I have spoken with a lot of other women who have been in a betrayal situation. And just this idea that there are other people out there who are going through the same situation is sometimes enough to pull you through. And that really gave me the courage to say, “I might as well put this out there.”
In the podcast you tend to use that phrase a lot too. You call it a “betrayal situation” rather than cheating. Do you prefer that wording? Or is this more of a vocabulary fixture?
Ariel: Oh, yes. It’s definitely terminology used a lot in therapy. There’s the betrayed partner and betrayal situation. But I like that it puts the focus on your experience, whereas the idea of cheating can be very triggering to a victim. It can bring up all this adrenaline and it just starts to rush through and you can lose your way. Whereas if you start thinking about it in less emotional ways, like stop using your lizard brain and start using your actual brain, then things can get done.
Ned, you make it very clear in the first podcast episode that you want to move past what you’re known for at the moment, which is being a very famous wife guy who then had a very public affair. What interests you about talking to other people about their worst moments?
Ned: This experience changed me as a person, as an artist, and it’s really changed the types of stories that I’m interested in telling. I’m very interested in connecting with other people who have gone through similar things or just general challenges in life. And I really want to be able to tell other people’s stories and showcase the experience and strength and resilience that people have in overcoming challenges.
A lot of your fans assume you made this colossal mistake and now they’re expecting — or were expecting — that you’d disappear from public life all together. Do you think that’s something that you have to combat?
Ned: I think this is something that we were both aware of that we needed to address if we were ever going to move forward in our lives and create something new. I think it’s really up to each individual person. But time heals all wounds. I think if you’re willing to put yourself out there and put your work out there for public consumption, people are going to feel a lot of different ways about it. So I’m really looking forward to telling other people’s stories and working on this new show, and I hope people get a lot of value from it.
How does your relationship work with one person who seems genuinely excited about being online and another who is open about being perfectly fine if no one online ever heard from her again?
Ned: I would say that I love creating. I don’t love being online, necessarily. The social media attention changed the way we feel about putting our personal life out there. You kind of have to just take the fact that, if you’re putting yourself out there, there’s going to be attention on your personal life. But hopefully we can keep better boundaries around our privacy and what we share and what we don’t share.
Ariel: The goal from this point forward is [that] Ned’s work is not going to be focused on himself. That’s the boundary that I’ve set for our family, not talking about our relationship, our dating lives, or our children.
Ariel, you’ve been open about how dehumanizing and violating national attention was at a time in your life where you were already struggling emotionally. How do you balance that frustration with the knowledge that if it wasn’t for fans, you wouldn’t have known Ned was cheating in the first place? Ned, do you ever think that if people hadn’t found out, you would have told her?
Ariel: That’s a great question, and honestly, something truly that I had not thought about. At that time, a wave of emotions came up for me. At first there was a doubt, of course. There was like, “What is happening? Is this real?” And then it turned into anger. But I don’t think there was ever anger towards the fans because honestly, people were just looking out for me. I just feel gratitude. The fan response has been overwhelmingly positive for me.
Ned: As soon as you [Ariel] discovered everything that was going on, it really became a process of privately and personally working through things on a relationship level and what that meant for our marriage. But I understand that when you put yourself out there as a creator, YouTuber, a public figure, then you kind of don’t have a right to privacy anymore.
Ariel: Also that time and my reaction was all tied into the experience of a betrayal. All of these things are happening all at once. So it’s the violation of safety, plus losing trust, plus the world-shattering situation happening around me. Everything I thought I knew wasn’t there anymore. And that’s a painful and devastating thing to work through.
The response to your affair was mostly outrage online. Does that factor into the show’s focus?
Ned: I understand the outrage, because I put myself out there in a type of way that was then not true. So I’m sure fans felt betrayed. And in the new show, I’m interested in exploring some of the conversations with nuance and depth, and you know, that aren’t just sensational and a little bit more like, “Here’s the reality of what life is like.”
Who are some guests people can expect?
Ned: We have Lara Love Hardin, [a writer] who overcame the battle of heroin addiction. We have a Real Housewife of Orange County, Shannon Beador, who went through a DUI situation and many messy relationships. We have Antong Lucky, who was a part of the Bloods gang in Dallas and then became a community advocate for nonviolence and a best-selling author. So, you know, there’s a lot of different stories that I’m interested to dive into and to show the depth of challenges that people face, and how they overcome it.
You two are open about how you’re moving forward not in a relationship but as coparents to your two kids. Before releasing this podcast, did you have to contend with the realization that your kids could one day listen to it?
Ariel: Oh, absolutely. We both knew that this was something that they would listen to. We almost kind of did it with them in mind. This is the type of conversation between your parents that you want to be able to see. They know we’re separated. And they’re not very tech savvy right now, thank God, but they will be one day. And we know it’s going to come up. I didn’t want them to Google their dad. I didn’t want them to Google their mom and have the scandal be the first thing that came up. I wanted there to be new work out there. I want to be able to say, “You guys were there. This is what we did to move past it. We moved past it with integrity. We moved past it with trust. We moved past it together.”
Ned: And I hope that by the time we have that age-appropriate conversation, they will have a decade of wonderful memories with their parents and their family. Even though their parents are not together.
Ariel, has becoming a ceramics artist been one the ways you’ve been able to get agency back following the scandal?
I suppose it was. Art has always been a part of my life. My mom is a studio artist, my grandmother is a studio artist. So I knew it was just a matter of time, and so I fell back into pottery, and I absolutely love it.
You’ve obviously had a very public, very online scandal, but in order for new work to succeed, you’ll have to be online again. Ned, how are you hoping fans will react?
Ned: For me, it’s just putting it out there and letting it speak for itself. That was how we wanted to approach the podcast. I don’t know how to feel about social media. I just let the work speak for itself.
Ariel: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like you are guarding yourself because you don’t want to have expectations.
Ned: Sure, sure. I’ve worked hard on not letting my self worth be dictated by comments and views and whatnot. I would love for the fans to interact. That would be amazing. But also, I don’t want to set my hopes on that, because, yeah, I don’t want to be disappointed. I’m proud of the interviews we’ve recorded and the show that we’re putting out there. I hope that people find it interesting and can develop a deeper sense of curiosity and empathy.
Ariel, when Ned asked in the podcast if you’ve forgiven him, you answered, “Fuck no.” It’s been months since that episode was recorded. Have those thoughts changed? Do you think you could ever forgive him?
Ariel: I don’t think it’s about forgiveness anymore. It’s not necessary. I’ve moved past the the issue of forgiveness and moved into a place where I’m hoping that we can move into something new that doesn’t require forgiveness. Ned, how do you feel about that idea?
Ned, how does it make you feel to hear Ariel say forgiveness isn’t something that’s on the table, especially as someone who thought the marriage could potentially survive following the infidelity?
Ned: I know then the last three years that we have done the work. We did bare it all. We did have a lot of difficult conversations, and we did work through a lot. It ended up with us letting our romantic relationship be in the past and creating a new chapter as friends and co-parents. That’s not to say it doesn’t hurt sometimes. I still grieve the marriage, still confronting the feelings around my own sense of self and my own actions. But I feel that I’m in a place where I’m able to move on into a new chapter
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Ariel: Exactly. And it could be worse!
Ned: It could be worse.
