Aaron Rodgers made a bold claim about his high-profile exes — including former fiancée, Shailene Woodley — drawing a straight line between his public persona and their reputation.
“The height of their fame is when they were with me,” Rodgers, 42, said on the Thursday, September 10, episode of the “Not Just Football” podcast. “They get clicks when they say my name. Just like the idiots on TV get clicks when they say my name because I am a lightning rod.”
Rodgers’ comments came just days after Woodley, 34, won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her performance on Hulu’s Paradise.
Woodley and Rodgers confirmed their engagement in February 2021. The couple split in early 2022 before getting married.
Rodgers made multiple other shocking claims about his relationship with Woodley during his rambling, often incoherent podcast interview, which was conducted by his Pittsburgh Steelers teammate Cam Heyward and Heyward’s childhood friend Hayden Walsh.
“I dated Shailene. I propose and she says yes,” Rodgers said. “Maybe she felt like she was forced to make a decision. She could have said no. But a couple days after that, she tells me, ‘You know, before we get married, I gotta go f*** this guy.’”
Rodgers also pushed back on the purported idea that he “ruined her life and gave her crazy depression because I left her.”
“But the actuality is, she told me that and then she took off the ring by March [2021],” he said. “I proposed in December [2020]. Took off the ring by March. We had a couple times where we tried to get reunited and nothing ever happened. There wasn’t even a relationship in ‘22 to break off.”
Rodgers continued, “She literally told me, ‘I don’t want to be with you’ after we tried to have some kind of reconciliation in 2021. There’s just a lot of narratives out there that are just not true.”
The quarterback urged Woodley and his ex-girlfriend Danica Patrick — who Rodgers dated from 2018 to 2020 — to stop bringing his name up in public.
“It’s been years,” he said. “What are you talking about? You’re not relevant. Stop talking about me. Move on with your life. Live your life.”
Woodley last mentioned Rodgers in any major way in September 2024, when she told Bustle that their relationship had left her with “a broken heart that healed and broke again.”
“It’s really taken me a lot of time to understand that it’s not on me to fix or heal or do anything about [a relationship] other than protect the deep care and love that I have for the world and for my people,” she said at the time. “Ultimately, that has helped me walk away without the need to understand why certain things didn’t play out the way that I may have desired them to.”
