Someone take Sarah Brady’s phone, please.
Over the weekend, Brady — a surfer, law student and ex-girlfriend of Jonah Hill — accused the actor of “emotional abuse,” releasing private text messages they exchanged while dating from August 2021 to early 2022.
In them, Hill, 39 asks her to take down photos of her “ass in a thong” and urged her to stop modeling and to chop out relationships with men and unstable women.
He comes across as manipulative and insecure, attempting to clip her wings to make himself more comfortable.
While I felt her pain and frustration on a visceral level — who amongst us hasn’t had our self-worth dinged by an ex? — the choice to present their relationship the WikiLeaks treatment was off-putting.
His texts, her instagram posts … all of it felt icky.
But then it got worse. Brady either didn’t get the response she wanted or the headlines hit her like heroin, sending her on a bender.
Yesterday, she released one other installment of the Hill files, insisting they were sexting just before he began dating his now girlfriend Olivia Millar, who gave birth to the couple’s first child last month.
And Brady continued to unload on Instagram, including posting alleged screenshots of Hill’s saying her releasing “intimate texts … [is] an enormous triggering violation for me and a breach of trust as a friend.”
In doing so, Brady not only made it clear that she was hurt because he had moved onto another person. She also made me feel sympathy for Hill, the king of self-seriousness.
I still giggle considering of the fit the actor threw during a 2013 Rolling Stone interview when he was asked, “What form of farter are you?”
On the time, he was with James Franco and Seth Rogan promoting “That is the End” — not a remake of “Hamlet.” The others rolled with the punches. Hill said this:
“I’m not answering that dumb query! I’m not that form of person! Being in a funny movie doesn’t make me need to answer dumb questions. It has nothing to do with who I’m,” he sniffed.
No wonder he’s gained a fame for being pretentious and humorless (a cardinal sin in my book).
But this Brady stuff appears like an odd hangover from #MeToo, wherein crappy, caddish or controlling behavior has been conflated with the criminal kind.
Brady calls it a catharsis, saying, “Keeping it to myself was causing more damage to my mental health than sharing it could ever do.”
(It has also prompted former Nickelodeon star Alexa Nikolas to accuse Hill of kissing her without consent when she was 16 and he was 24. If that’s true, it’s gross. Hill’s attorney told Page Six the story was a “complete fabrication.”)
Brady is just not alone on this behavior. Most recently, influencer Sophia Culpo, in a now deleted TikTok, posted messages between her and her Jets reciever ex, Braxton Barrios, whom she accused of cheating on her.
The difference? Influencers like Culpo commodify their relationships, making romance a cornerstone of their online presence.
Hill just looks as if a man who happens to be famous and is trying to this point.
But this isn’t a rom-com where the girlfriend gets revenge on a sh–ty boyfriend by weaponizing his own words, flipping the ability dynamics and coming out on top. That is the true world. And what Brady has done is a breach of trust.
As such a post-breakup behavior becomes normalized, it should make all of us shudder. I hope Brady gives her good sense time to catch up together with her trigger fingers.
