Firerose is opening up about her marriage to Billy Ray Cyrus, several months after their divorce was finalized.
The 36-year-old singer, whose real name is Johanna Rosie Hodges, opened up for a new cover story with Australian magazine Stellar.
Firerose says she first met Billy when she was 22 and auditioning on a Hollywood lot and she encountered him. She didn’t know who he was at the time, but he took an interest in her.
“He said, I’ll just introduce you to everyone else and we can hang out for the rest of the day,” Firerose said. “My gut instinct, honestly, was: what does this guy want? I probably should have had way better boundaries.”
“I was by no means interested [in a romance],” Firerose said. “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.”
Firerose and Billy lost touch until the pandemic, when they collaborated as music artists. The relationship eventually turned romantic. That’s when things changed for her.
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“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or together in public, where I’d often try to be overly positive as I was scared to let anyone see how devastatingly withdrawn I’d become,” Firerose said.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.’”
Firerose claims that Billy told her “things like, ‘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.”
Firerose says that Billy only allowed her to have 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? 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 said. “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.”
Read more on Stellar‘s website.
