Firerose Gets Candid About Billy Ray Cyrus Marriage: ‘So Weird and Unacceptable’

In her cover story with Australian magazine Stellar, the 36-year-old singer — whose real name is Johanna Rosie Hodges — opens up about when she first met the “Achy Breaky Heart” singer and her relationship regrets.

“He said, I’ll just introduce you to everyone else and we can hang out for the rest of the day,” Firerose said of her first encounter with Cyrus when she was a 22-year-old singer auditioning on a Hollywood lot.

“My gut instinct, honestly, was: what does this guy want? I probably should have had way better boundaries,” she recalled. “I was by no means interested [in a romance].”

“But I couldn’t have seen 10 years into the future. When I think about what I just went through, I would have told my 22-year-old self to run in the opposite direction and never look back,” she continued.

The two fell out of touch, only reconnecting once the pandemic hit and they collaborated as musicians. The relationship eventually turned romantic.

“All of a sudden, instead of being my normal lively, outgoing self, I became very introverted unless we were working or together in public, where I’d often try to be overly positive as I was scared to let anyone see how devastatingly withdrawn I’d become,” Firerose said.

“My family and friends all had the same experience: me withdrawing and pushing them away. The way I experienced it was: ‘Oh, he’s just really protective,'” she continued.

Firerose claimed that there were a lot of rules to follow once she started dating Cyrus.

According to Firerose, Cyrus would say: “‘Well, you can’t live that way anymore. You’re a Cyrus now. You can’t be going to church. You can’t be going to public places where people could follow you home. You’re going to be murdered.’ It sounds crazy, but that’s what was happening.”

She also claimed she wasn’t allowed to have more than one friend at their wedding.

“And that was my hairstylist,” Firerose said.

“I was allowed to have her over because she was doing my hair. It was quite hurtful, in retrospect, and it breaks my heart. How did I not think that that was so weird and unacceptable?” she asked. “I justified it like, well, that’s my life now. I accepted his lunacy as reality.”

“By the point where I realized it was too late, what was even worse was he blamed me somehow for everything that had previously gone wrong in his life,” she claimed.

“For someone who’s had so many good things happen to him, and so much luck and so many blessings, to be that empty is really sad. And I thought, I’m just going to keep loving him, pouring my heart and soul into this relationship,” she said.

The pair called it quits on their marriage this past June, after roughly seven months of marriage. He filed for an annulment, before she accused him of “extreme verbal, emotional and psychological abuse”; the pair eventually settled the divorce in August.

Cyrus was previously married to Tish Cyrus for almost three decades. In 2010, Cyrus filed for divorce, but several months later he ended up dropping the request. The couple remained married for several years but then Tish filed for divorce in 2013. She rescinded the request just a month later.

The couple’s marriage finally came to an end in April 2022, when they filed for divorce for a third time. Tish later explained that during the pandemic, she truly had time to reflect on the relationship and what she wanted out of life — and realized she should have left much sooner.

“During that period, I took a really good, hard look at life, my life, and like, ‘What was I gonna do?’ Because it had not been in a good place for a long time. And I think I did stay so long out of fear of being alone,” she said on the Call Her Daddy podcast. “I really didn’t want Noah [Cyrus] to still be young [when we divorced]. But looking back on it, it would have been much better for her had I left.”

Read more on Firerose’s marriage to Cyrus on Stellar’s website.