Trisha Paytas has lived a million lives. No single moniker could successfully encapsulate what she’s done and continues to do for pop culture. She’s been a bizarre staple of early aughts daytime TV, an OnlyFans star, a meme, a YouTube phenomenon, Troy Bolton, and even a chicken nugget. And now, Paytas is finally recounting the story behind all those iterations of herself in her new memoir, Crying on the Kitchen Floor , out tomorrow. The book doesn’t shy away from any of the darker chapters of the YouTuber’s life, whether it be her absent father, mental health struggles, escorting in Hollywood, or the fallout with her Frenemies co-host, Ethan Klein . But we all know this story ultimately has a happy ending as Paytas is now happily married with three kids and has found success beyond her wildest dreams this year, appearing in Euphoria season 3 and Beetlejuice on Broadway. In yet another pinch-me moment, TV legend Maury Povich gave Paytas a call to learn more about the woman at the center of 20 years of YouTube drama, and how she finally got out of it.
THURSDAY 12PM OCTOBER 22, 2026 LOS ANGELES
PAYTAS: Good. Very excited to meet you virtually.
POVICH: Well, you know I’m not Jerry Springer.
PAYTAS: That’s probably for the better. When they said, “Maury is going to interview you for this,” I was like, “What?” I can’t even believe it. I’m speechless right now.
POVICH: I mean, it is some memoir, Crying on the Kitchen Floor . Is there anything you left out? Because as far as the parts that I’ve read, you let it all out.
PAYTAS: When I tell stories online, it’s all out of sequence. It’s rambling. But with the book, I was like, “I need to put everything out there once and for all.” That way I can stop talking about it in the future and it’s just out there for anyone, so I can always reference it. If you want to know more, read the book.
POVICH: I’m not too sure you’re going to stop talking about it, because there are a lot of things in this book that people probably don’t know about you and will ask about in the future. Let me start off with this: Do you talk to your brother-in-law?
POVICH: Wow. I did not know that. This is Ethan Klein, with whom you had a very popular podcast called Frenemies . It only lasted 41 episodes. He’s the [husband] of your husband’s sister, right?
PAYTAS: There’s a long list of reasons. The podcast ended tumultuously in 2021. We had a final episode. We both apologized and took accountability for it ending, which is great. That episode never aired, and then began a three-month back-and-forth war with each other. I conceded September of 2021 because I just mentally couldn’t handle it. So for the past five years, I’ve never mentioned Ethan or Hila [Hacmon, his soon-to-be ex-wife]. And they could not stop mentioning us.
POVICH: He talks about you, but you don’t talk about him?
PAYTAS: Yeah, and it just crossed too many lines. It’s fine if people come for me. I come for people all the time. It crosses lines when he talked about my sexual assault as a child and said I lied about it. He said I lied about my infertility, cussed at my husband, talked about our children. There’s no line he hasn’t crossed, and there’s no coming back from it. It makes me sad because I really loved Ethan as a person, I loved being in that family, and my husband was really close to them. It’s truly the most heartbreaking thing, but it’s a person I don’t know anymore.
POVICH: How does it affect Moses, your husband?
PAYTAS: I don’t want to speak for him too much, but it affects him. He’s a very peaceful person. He’s never once talked about them publicly. All Ethan does is air out their family drama. He brings all of Moses’s family into it. Moses respects their wishes to keep it offline, but Ethan won’t. I always say, “Anytime you want to reconcile or reach out,” but we’re both aligned in the sense that it’s just too far gone. Too much has been done.
POVICH: Yeah. I want to get into the book now. It’s quite remarkable. What was it like as a pre-teen going back and forth between Illinois and California because your parents split up?
PAYTAS: You don’t know any different when you’re a kid. What you have is normal. So at the time, I didn’t think anything of it. We would travel alone at the time, so I hated going on planes. I hated not being home for the summers because my home was my mom’s home. It was the cozy home. My dad’s was not. It was really difficult. I didn’t have friends in either city. My parents both worked 18-hour days. I don’t remember a day I wasn’t lonely.
POVICH: You write about searching for your father’s love.
PAYTAS: He became such a central figure in the book, and I never thought of him like that. When I was writing, I was like, “Oh, I just won’t mention my dad, especially because now we’re on good terms.” But I spent my entire life looking for some sort of male figure, a protector, someone to love me. I grew up watching a ton of movies, and I just wanted love, a fatherly love, a romantic love. I wanted that so bad.
POVICH: And your father wasn’t the type of person to give it to you?
PAYTAS: No, he can never show it. I never felt it. I don’t know if he could connect with me, to be honest. To this day, my father has a tough time communicating. We’re close because he’s so great with my kids, but we can never talk about this stuff because he just doesn’t know how.
POVICH: Right. How did you become the world’s biggest expert on Quentin Tarantino as a teenager?
PAYTAS: At six, I saw Pulp Fiction , and then from there—
POVICH: Wait a second, you saw Pulp Fiction at six, and it affected you? [Laughs]
PAYTAS: Yeah, it changed my whole life. I said, “That’s what I want to be. I need to go to L.A. and be all of that.” I wanted to be every character in that movie. [Laughs] I was a big Quentin fan at the time.
POVICH: So you wanted to be [John] Travolta, and [Uma] Thurman, and Samuel L. Jackson.
PAYTAS: Oh, yeah. Vincent, Jules, Mia—I was going to be all three, and I kind of did. I became all three in some capacity.
POVICH: Well, in a way, that’s true. You were still obsessed once you got to Hollywood when you were a late teen?
PAYTAS: I always liked the movies. I had a lot of confusion and delusion where I couldn’t separate a movie from a real person or a real place. So I went to Los Angeles searching for Quentin Tarantino, thinking, “Well, he’ll put me in the movies.” I really had that in my mind, which was obviously a little crazy in hindsight. But I did get to meet him within three weeks of moving to L.A., so I realized then that I was a powerful manifestor.
PAYTAS: Yeah, I did meet him, but I didn’t become a movie star.
POVICH: [Laughs] The other apparent fascination you had, and I’m truly offended by this, was my dear friend, Jerry Springer.
PAYTAS: You were the icon that we should have been watching. I found The Jerry Springer Show because my parents weren’t home, so I was watching boobs when I should have been watching Maury . At least I would’ve been watching baby daddy stuff with you. With Jerry Springer , I was just watching naked ladies bench-pressing.
POVICH: Yeah. Well, I will tell you that Jerry was a dear friend of mine, and you couldn’t have wanted to be closer to a better guy. He was that nice and that decent.
POVICH: That’s how I’ll leave it with Jerry. I always believed, Trisha, that there’s a common thing between all of those great daytime talk shows and all of the reality shows that followed . All of that emanated from those talk shows we did in the ’90s and the 2000s.
PAYTAS: 100%. Obviously, I was very influenced, for better or worse, by all of them.
POVICH: So you end up coming to L.A., and it turned into a very dark period for you.
PAYTAS: I came in very naive and excited, so I don’t realize how much it jaded me. I did book a daytime talk show, actually, The Greg Behrendt Show , and then the show got canceled. That’s when things take a spiral. I have to figure out how to make money without a college degree, without any sort of experience.
POVICH: I must say that you’re very truthful when you say that you were a terrible striptease dancer.
PAYTAS: Yeah, I was not a great stripper. It was not like the movies. I was not Demi Moore in Striptease , for sure.
POVICH: But that got you into the underbelly part of Hollywood, and you ended up tricking.
PAYTAS: Yeah, I did. I was on a literal street corner. I don’t know if that still exists now with the internet and social media.
POVICH: I happen to know the street corner you were at—Santa Monica and Highland—because I used to work at Channel 2 in L.A., and that was very nearby. But when I knew it was before you knew it. [Laughs] Not only was that a difficult time, but one night you were walking home and you were assaulted and molested. How did that affect you?
PAYTAS: That’s when I became numb to everything. I didn’t get as graphic in the book. This sounds kind of crazy, but as a kid, I romanticized things like that, which is insane to say. But when I would see it in movies, I looked at it in a way that wasn’t traumatizing. After that, I realized how much it changed me. It changed me completely. It rewired the chemicals in my brain.
PAYTAS: I started looking at the world as all bad, as all evil, as my body was no longer mine. That’s why I started doing more sex work. I was like, “I don’t have any autonomy. I don’t have control of my brain anymore.” I looked at everything as evil. I became super paranoid. I just became a shell of a person. At that point, I started letting people do whatever to me, say whatever to me. When I came to L.A., I had so much confidence. I was like, “I’m going to be a star.” At that point, I had zero self-worth. I didn’t care what happened to me, and honestly, didn’t care what happened to other people either. I lacked any empathy that I came to L.A. with.
POVICH: And coupling that with starting to take pills in order to get through it.
PAYTAS: Yeah. The pills made me able to function and socialize, where before that, I shut off. I would look at someone with dead eyes. It made me feel more normal, while also still completely not in control of my body or mind.
POVICH: And yet, in 2013, the first YouTube provocateur. How did that happen?
PAYTAS: I started posting on YouTube in 2007. But 2013 is when I started making money on YouTube.
POVICH: You said you had to dumb yourself down in order to get an audience.
PAYTAS: Yeah. Pulling from the early 2000s, not just the talk shows, but also Anna Nicole Smith or Jessica Simpson, I thought that was the route I needed to take online because it worked well for them, and I admired those women. I thought they were beautiful, and I was like, “You know what? It worked well for them. Let me do this as well.” So I was going to be as dumb as possible, and nothing was as degrading as what I was doing on the streets. So to me, I was like, “This is a level up. This is acting. This is Hollywood,” and it worked. I was making 10 times what I would make selling my body. It was my way out.
POVICH: It basically took you off the street, right?
PAYTAS: 1000%. I never went back. I went back to sex work, just not on the street, which is really the scariest form, where you’re just going into anyone’s car.
POVICH: So were you escorting at the same time you were YouTubing?
PAYTAS: I was. Around 2012, I was able to stop doing that because I made enough money on my YouTube videos.
POVICH: When did you feel you made it, in terms of YouTube and reaching an audience?
PAYTAS: Around that time. I was able to move out fully on my own and support myself without having to do any sex work. I stopped doing drugs. I was living on the beach, sand in my backyard, and it felt like Jackie Brown , another Quentin movie I loved. I felt like Bridget Fonda. It was everything.
POVICH: I love that, in a way, you’re still kind of naive despite all of your experiences. You’re still starstruck by all of it. [Laughs]
PAYTAS: Oh, I still am. Even to this day, I get a little starstruck. Sometimes I still relate my life to a movie. Even talking to you, it feels like a movie. It feels, like, not real.
POVICH: When it came to podcasts, what was your breakout? Was it in the early ’20s?
PAYTAS: 2020 was the Frenemies era, so that was definitely working, five to six million views.
POVICH: Can you tell me how much you were making back then?
PAYTAS: My portion was about $100,000, which I was grateful for. I was also doing OnlyFans at the time, so I was making another $100,000 from there. I was making probably $100,000 on my own channels and social media at the time. So altogether, I was making about $300,000, and that was doing one episode a week and just reselling old videos on my OnlyFans. I was doing the least amount of work for the most.
POVICH: And that’s a pittance now, with Just Trish , right? How many YouTube followers does Just Trish have?
PAYTAS: I think we’re at a million. We’re pretty new, but we get 20 to 30 million views a month.
POVICH: So how is my podcast On Par with Maury Povich going to get those kinds of views?
PAYTAS: Honestly, Maury, oh my god, if you did an OnlyFans, you would be a billionaire. Everyone would sign up.
POVICH: [Laughs] Oh, gosh. What happened when you went to the United Kingdom to do Celebrity Big Brother , and it lasted like 11 days?
PAYTAS: Oh. Well, I self-evicted. I took myself off this show. I was mentally unwell. 2017 was before any sort of therapy or diagnosis for my mental health, so I was in a downward spiral. I just found out my boyfriend was gay the year prior. I got a BBL that year. I was mentally struggling, and then they put me in isolation with no phone and no one I know. I just stayed in bed, and I was scared of everything and everyone. They also gave me no washcloths to bathe with. It just felt like torture to me at the time.
PAYTAS: Technically, I did. I wasn’t aware how unstable I was, that I couldn’t handle it. If I went in there now, it would be a vacation. I’d be like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t have to take care of anybody but myself.” It would be a breeze. But back then, it was torture.
POVICH: So what brought you out of that mental spiral?
PAYTAS: Nothing. I spiraled more in 2017. 2018, I got into a relationship, so that saved me for about a year until it ended, and then I spiraled to the pits of hell in 2019. I went to the mental hospital. I was 5150’d. I tried meth and heroin for the first time. Then, I got a diagnosis, I got a therapist, and I started healing a little bit.
POVICH: Give me the year that, all of a sudden, the sun came out.
PAYTAS: 2021 was the hardest year. When Frenemies ended, I went into a psychosis, and I think that was hard because I wasn’t on any pills. I had a fiancé. I had everything I wanted. I had a house that I owned, but I just spiraled too hard from the internet. I had to truly live a monk life where I was outside for 15 hours a day meditating. I had to make money, so I was meditating on TikTok Live and people were throwing tomatoes at me, but those tomatoes cost money, so I was making money that way. I just meditated for about three months straight, not to say that fixes everything. I’ve been on medication, I’ve been to therapy, I do the work to this day, but it helped a lot to just get off the internet and stop reading comments obsessively. I lived and died by the comments.
POVICH: And you felt that you suffered from infertility, yet here come three children.
PAYTAS: As I say in my book—and it’s not something I’m super proud of—I was trying to get pregnant by almost anybody from the age of 24. I thought having a baby was going to fix me. I thought that was the love that I needed. I always felt a calling to be a mom. I went to doctors for years because I would be in relationships and I wasn’t getting pregnant. It was bizarre. I had chlamydia twice in my early 20s that was left untreated for a long time, which scarred my tubes. Long story short, I was infertile for about 10 years. Even with my husband, we were trying for about a year, and I started healing myself. I did the meditation. I prayed. I did all these things, but we also did the HSG test, which is the first step of fertility treatments used to see what your tubes look like. It cleared my tubes out, and within three weeks, I was pregnant. I had done that test in previous years with other partners, and it did not work. So I truly feel it was the right timing, the right person, and healing myself. If I would’ve had a baby anytime before that, I probably would’ve given it up for adoption because I know I wouldn’t have been able to take care of it. I had to heal myself. It’s a miracle. I know it’s science as well, but I also think it was the right time.
POVICH: Early on, you wanted a baby no matter what. I said, “Sounds like all the out-of-control teenagers on my show who want to run the streets to get pregnant because they need unconditional love.”
PAYTAS: Yeah. Honestly, I felt it. I’d watch your show and I’d be like, “They have two guys that want them, and they don’t know who the dad is?!” I was like, “How lucky are they that two people could potentially be the father?” I thought it was a flex back in the day, so that tells you how warped I was. But people just want love, and a baby will give you love.
POVICH: They don’t have it at home. They’re going to find it elsewhere.
POVICH: When did everything just pop for you? You’re doing the Las Vegas show, you’re in Beetlejuice , you’re on the third season of Euphoria . You’re doing all these things. How did that happen?
PAYTAS: That, to me, is probably the most miraculous of all. I never had a manager or agent. So, Creative Artists Agency found me in 2024 when I was seven months pregnant with my second child. I was 36. By Hollywood standards, you’re damaged goods, old news. I thought no one would care, but it was the first time I was ever signed to an agency. Ever since then I took off, but they probably noticed stability. Who would want to work with me with everything that was going on in my 20s? The timing’s always right. I could never have done all the things I’m doing now back in my 20s. I would’ve flaked, I would’ve canceled, I would’ve been really unprofessional, so I just wasn’t ready. Now, I’m almost 40. I feel like I’m thriving more than ever, and I’m just hitting my stride.
POVICH: Wow. You would never have thought that when you were a teenager trying to make it in Hollywood.
PAYTAS: Never. They say at 25 you’re done. So I’m very thankful.
POVICH: Crying on the Kitchen Floor . Where does the title come from?
PAYTAS: Well, I cried on the kitchen floor for about five years of my life.
POVICH: Did you really cry on the kitchen floor?
PAYTAS: Oh, yeah. If you type in “crying on the kitchen floor,” you’re going to see at least a thousand videos of me bawling my eyes out over a guy, or a vampire in my house, or being a chicken nugget. There’s just a plethora of reasons I was crying. That was the time I was making the most money. I was mentally spiraling for the world to see because I needed attention and I needed validation. I was a mental wreck. I was embarrassing. Nobody wanted to work with me, but I was making money.
POVICH: I don’t think that is applying here today, Trisha. I think you’ve done just fine.
POVICH: It’s been great to talk to you. Crying on the Kitchen Floor is out, and I’m sure it’ll be a big seller the way you are.
PAYTAS: Thank you so much. I so appreciate talking to you. Hopefully we can meet one day.
POVICH: Absolutely. I’d love that. Thanks, Trish.
Source: Fashion
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