Aaron Rodgers is speaking out, and he’s not holding back. The Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback opened up about his past engagement to actress Shailene Woodley during an appearance on teammate Cam Heyward’s podcast, Not Just Football, and shared a version of events that sharply contradicts the public narrative.
Rodgers claimed that just days after Woodley accepted his proposal, she told him she wanted to sleep with another man before they got married. “I propose, and she says yes,” Rodgers said. “She maybe felt like she was forced to make a decision. She could have said no. But not a couple days after that, she tells me, ‘Before we get married, I got to go f— this guy.'”
According to Rodgers, the engagement unraveled quickly. He says Woodley took off her ring by March after he proposed in December. The couple made a few attempts to reconcile, but nothing stuck. “There wasn’t even a relationship in ’22 to break off,” Rodgers said. “She literally told me, ‘I don’t want to be with you.'”
The Aaron Rodgers Shailene Woodley breakup has been discussed publicly for years, but this marks the first time Rodgers has offered his own detailed account. He pushed back on the suggestion that he was the one who walked away, saying the narrative that he “ruined her life and gave her crazy depression” simply isn’t true.
Woodley has spoken about the relationship sparingly. In a 2024 interview, she described the period around their split as deeply painful. “I felt like I lost my soul, my self, my happiness, my joy,” she said. She called the relationship “not right” but “beautiful,” and admitted that discussing it still makes her cry.
Rodgers’ comments also took aim at his ex-girlfriends more broadly. “I dated two women who nobody gives a f— about unless they drop my name,” he said, referring to Woodley and former NASCAR driver Danica Patrick. “The height of their fame was when they were with me.”
Woodley’s representatives have not responded publicly to Rodgers’ latest claims.
