Pete Davidson Says He “Cleared the Path” for Kim Kardashian’s Post-Kanye Dating Life
Four years after their breakup, Davidson is looking back on the Kim-Kanye chaos with surprising tenderness, a little gallows humor and absolutely no interest in pretending it was normal.
Pete Davidson has a theory about his place in Kim Kardashian’s romantic history: he took the first hit.
Four years after he and Kardashian ended their nine-month relationship, the comedian is revisiting the era when their romance became a full-contact spectator sport—complete with paparazzi, security details, social-media warfare and an ex-husband who turned Davidson into a claymation kidnapping victim.
Speaking to Variety in an interview published Sept. 30, Davidson made it clear that there is no lingering Kardashian frostiness. “We’re cool,” he said, adding that he has “a lot of love” for his former girlfriend. Then, with the particular blend of self-deprecation and emotional intelligence that has become his signature, he offered a postmortem on the relationship, the circus around it and the role he believes he played in Kardashian’s future dating life.
“I like to think I got that one out of the way for her,” Davidson said of the backlash from Kanye “Ye” West. “Whoever that guy was going to be was gonna get it. I cleared the path for her to get back into the dating pool.”
The Kardashian relationship was never exactly a quiet one
Davidson and Kardashian first connected after she hosted Saturday Night Live in October 2021, where the two shared a now-famous sketch involving a magic carpet, a genie and a kiss that sent the internet into immediate overdrive. Their relationship soon moved beyond the show, and Kardashian became the first person to date West after their split.
That timing mattered. Kardashian was not simply entering a new relationship; she was doing it in public while still navigating the fallout from her divorce and West’s escalating online attacks. Davidson, meanwhile, was stepping into a family whose level of fame makes ordinary celebrity seem almost quaint. He said he found the Kardashian family’s certainty about their lifestyle attractive at first.
“That’s a really tough atmosphere if you’re not game,” Davidson told Variety. “One of the things I love about Kim and that whole family is they’re like, ‘This is what we do.’ I found that very attractive and mature.”
It is a telling description. Kardashian’s world is not merely famous; it is operational. There are cameras, security teams, schedules, stylists, brand obligations and an entire family ecosystem that has spent decades converting personal life into public narrative. Davidson, who has been candid about mental-health struggles and his sobriety journey, said the attention eventually became difficult to absorb.
“The craze of that lifestyle—being followed everywhere, having security and looking over your shoulder—for a guy with mental stuff, and at the time drug problems, was a little too much for me,” he said.
Then came the part nobody could pretend was normal
The relationship’s most volatile backdrop was West, who shares four children with Kardashian. According to Davidson, the online hostility was especially destabilizing because it collided with struggles he had already discussed publicly.
West’s attacks included repeated online messages and a music video for “Eazy” that depicted a clay version of Davidson being kidnapped and beheaded. Davidson recalled feeling that West was effectively telling him to kill himself, despite Davidson’s openness about his mental-health history.
“What tripped me out is I was super open about mental stuff—everyone knows this about me—and it’s like he was [saying], ‘Kill yourself,’” Davidson said. “And he did push me.”
That period produced one of the strangest celebrity feuds of the 2020s: Kardashian’s new boyfriend versus her estranged husband, with the whole thing unfolding in public and frequently dragging their children, their co-parenting situation and their enormous audiences into the frame. Davidson was a willing participant in the joke machine at times, but his comments suggest the experience was far less entertaining from inside the blast radius.
Still, he did not describe West with simple villain-edit certainty. Davidson acknowledged West’s own public pressures, the death of his mother and his mental-health struggles, while admitting he could not understand what it felt like to be someone with that level of influence.
“I’m not one-one-millionth as talented or influential or powerful as that dude,” Davidson said, “but I have dealt with a fraction of what he’s had to deal with public-wise—and that’ll do it.”
That empathy does not erase what Davidson says happened. It does, however, make the story more complicated than the usual celebrity breakup revenge arc. Davidson is describing a painful situation without pretending he has no idea why the person at its center might behave badly. Hollywood loves a clean hero and villain. Pete Davidson, predictably, seems more comfortable in the messy middle.
Kim has moved on—and Pete is apparently fine with it
Kardashian and Davidson ultimately decided they were better as friends, and their relationship has settled into the rarest post-breakup category in celebrity culture: genuinely cordial, with no obvious need to stage-manage the cordiality.
Davidson is now a father to nine-month-old daughter Scottie Rose Hewitt Davidson with former girlfriend Elsie Hewitt. Kardashian, meanwhile, is dating Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton, according to E! News. The romantic plot has moved forward, but Davidson’s remarks show that the old relationship has not been rewritten as a mistake.
He still speaks warmly about Kardashian and her family, even while admitting that their lifestyle was not ultimately sustainable for him. The distinction matters. Celebrity breakups are often packaged as either secret bitterness or effortless friendship. Davidson is offering something more recognizable: affection without a desire to reunite, gratitude mixed with relief, and a clear understanding that loving someone does not mean wanting their entire world back.
His “cleared the path” joke also lands because it captures the bizarre emotional math of dating Kardashian. The person who comes after her is not just dating a woman; they are entering a franchise, a family mythology and a relationship history that is already being watched by millions. Davidson became the first post-West boyfriend, absorbed an extraordinary amount of public hostility and eventually exited with his relationship with Kardashian intact.
That is not exactly a peaceful romance. It is more like surviving a very glamorous natural disaster and later sending a friendly birthday text to the weather system.
And while Kardashian’s current chapter appears to be Hamilton-shaped, Davidson’s version of the story is notably free of jealousy. He is not hinting at a reconciliation, baiting his ex or pretending the past did not happen. He is simply saying that he loved her, the experience was intense, the atmosphere around it was brutal—and, somehow, they are still good.
In the celebrity breakup economy, that may be the closest thing to a happy ending.
Sophia Bush and Ashlyn Harris Were Already Wives While Everyone Was Still Catching Up
The couple quietly married in upstate New York last summer, with Harris’ children in attendance and roasted marshmallows closing out the kind of celebrity wedding that refuses to behave like a celebrity wedding.
Some celebrity couples soft-launch with a blurry hand in the corner of an Instagram carousel. Sophia Bush and Ashlyn Harris apparently prefer the hard launch of an entire marriage.
Bush revealed to Vogue that she and Harris have been married for more than a year, quietly tying the knot in upstate New York in the summer of 2025. The news arrives not through a dramatic photo dump or a suspiciously diamond-heavy red-carpet pose, but in the pages of Bush’s upcoming memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress. Naturally, the couple has managed to make “surprise, we’re wives” feel both intimate and extremely headline-shaped.
The ceremony was small, family-centered and intentionally low-pressure. Harris’ children, Sloane, 5, and Ocean, 4, attended, while Bush’s best friend Nia Batts officiated. Bush described the day as one where the kids ran around happily, picked flowers from the property and ended the evening eating roasted marshmallows. No reported spectacle. No giant celebrity guest list. No wedding-industrial-complex performance art. Just flowers, rings, children and a very persuasive case for keeping your biggest life moments away from the content calendar.
The secret wedding was almost aggressively un-Hollywood
“It was so fun for them, because it wasn’t this pressure-filled day that’s too much for young kids,” Bush told Vogue. She called the wedding “so precious” and “zero pressure,” which is exactly the sort of phrase that makes a glossy celebrity wedding story feel less like a luxury campaign and more like the one rare event in Hollywood where nobody had to be photographed pretending to enjoy a champagne tower.
Harris, 40, spent years playing professional soccer in stadiums packed with tens of thousands of people. Bush, 44, has spent much of her adult life performing for television audiences in the millions, first as Brooke Davis on One Tree Hill and later in shows including Chicago P.D. Their decision to make the wedding deliberately quiet reads less like secrecy for secrecy’s sake and more like a boundary drawn around something they wanted to keep theirs.
Afterward, the newlyweds visited loved ones in person to share the news. That detail is almost quaint now, and therefore wildly luxurious. In an era when a relationship can be announced, litigated and turned into reaction GIFs before the couple has finished breakfast, Bush and Harris apparently chose the radical thrill of telling people face-to-face.
“You’re not my partner, you know?” Bush recalled telling Harris. “You’re my wife. And it feels so amazing to say that.”
A relationship that arrived with a lot of public noise
The timing of Bush and Harris’ romance made them an instant topic of conversation. They went public in 2023, after both had recently come out of marriages. Bush had married businessman Grant Hughes in 2022, and the pair divorced in 2023. Before that, she was married to Chad Michael Murray from 2005 to 2006. Harris filed for divorce from fellow retired soccer star Ali Krieger in September 2023, after nearly four years of marriage. Harris and Krieger share Sloane and Ocean.
Page Six confirmed Bush and Harris’ romance the following month, and the relationship quickly became less of a new-couple curiosity than a full internet discourse event. Bush came out as queer in a Glamour cover story in April 2024, while also pushing back on speculation about how the relationship began.
In that interview, Bush denied rumors that she had left Hughes because of “some hysterical rendezvous” with Harris, saying the alleged infidelity “never happened.” She also rejected the idea that she had only recently discovered she was attracted to women. “My partners have known what I’m into for as long as I have,” she said, adding a breezy “sorry!” for anyone still trying to turn her sexuality into a plot twist.
That history gives the wedding announcement an extra layer. This isn’t simply a famous woman revealing a famous new spouse. It is Bush reclaiming the chronology of her own life after months of strangers trying to narrate it for her. The public got the romance in 2023, the queer coming-out story in 2024 and now, belatedly, the wedding in 2025. The couple has been living several chapters ahead of the audience.
Meet the new era: less spectacle, more “wholly mine”
Bush writes about the ceremony in her memoir, which is scheduled for release Oct. 27. In an excerpt, she describes the day as magical and writes, “We wept. We laughed. We exchanged rings. The invisible string pulled tighter around us.” Then comes the line that explains the entire soft-but-not-soft launch: “This is the first chapter of my life that feels truly, wholly, divinely mine.”
There is a distinctly grown-up pleasure in the way this wedding has entered the culture. It is not a giant reveal designed to dominate a weekend. It is not a breakup disguised as a statement. It is not a matching-outfit campaign begging the internet to decode a caption. It is a famous couple saying that, for once, the important part happened before the announcement.
And yet, because this is celebrity culture, the quiet wedding still has a built-in cinematic ending: children scattering through an upstate property, flowers gathered by small hands, two women exchanging rings and the whole thing winding down over roasted marshmallows. It sounds less like a wedding planner’s mood board than the closing scene of a prestige romance in which everyone finally stops explaining themselves.
Bush and Harris have now supplied the title: wife and wife. The rest of us can catch up when the memoir arrives.
Sydney Sweeney Just Turned Lake Powell Into Her Personal Baywatch Set
The actress brought a Pamela Anderson-coded red swimsuit, a very public boyfriend caption and an entire summer-adventure montage to Utah.
Sydney Sweeney has apparently decided that a normal vacation is for people with fewer than 20 million Instagram followers. The actress spent a recent getaway at Lake Powell, Utah, serving red swimsuit glamour, wakeboarding action and extremely boyfriend-forward captions while vacationing with Scooter Braun and a group of friends.
In the photos she shared Tuesday, Sweeney wears a bright red, scoop-neck one-piece with high hips and a low-cut neckline—the kind of swimsuit that arrives with its own soundtrack and expects someone nearby to yell “Baywatch!” The comparison was immediate. Page Six noted that the look could have come straight from Pamela Anderson’s Emerald Bay era, and fans began commenting on the resemblance.
The setting, naturally, did its part. Lake Powell’s red rock formations gave the trip a cinematic backdrop, turning what might have been a standard celebrity lake day into a very specific piece of summer mythology: blond actress, scarlet swimsuit, impossible scenery, boat, action sports and a man who apparently knows how to plan a memorable itinerary.
The caption was doing some heavy lifting
But the swimsuit was only half the story. Sweeney captioned the carousel, “when your man takes you to the moon 🌒,” a line that lands somewhere between soft launch and full-volume public affection. There is no coy “weekend away” language here, no mysterious arm at the edge of a frame, no strategic use of the word “friends” to make everyone guess. The boyfriend is in the caption, even if the post’s visual mood is mostly devoted to Utah, water and Sweeney looking like she wandered off the set of a glossy action movie.
That phrasing also gives the trip a distinctly romantic charge. “Your man” is not the language of a casual plus-one; it is the language of someone being credited for the itinerary, the view and possibly the entire emotional atmosphere. Whether Braun actually arranged every detail of the trip is not the point. In the caption, he is the person who took her to the moon, and Sweeney is letting the internet admire the view.
The couple were joined by friends, keeping the getaway from becoming a two-person influencer campaign. The group hiked, boated, wakeboarded and waterskied, with Sweeney’s red suit proving functional enough for the athletic portion of the program. It is a rare celebrity vacation post that manages to suggest both luxury and the possibility of someone falling into the water on camera.
This relationship has an adventure-travel beat
The Utah trip also fits a pattern Page Six has been tracking. Sweeney and Braun have already been photographed or posted about as an increasingly adventurous pair: they went jet skiing in the Mediterranean during the summer, then reportedly went bungee jumping together in New Zealand a few weeks before this Lake Powell escape.
That is a lot of adrenaline for a relationship whose public image could otherwise be reduced to glamorous dinners and carefully lit selfies. Sweeney and Braun seem to be building a particular kind of couple branding around movement: boats, cliffs, water, speed, altitude. Their romance is not sitting still long enough to become background noise.
Sweeney has also worn a necklace featuring Braun’s initials, “SB,” on many occasions, according to Page Six. The detail is subtle by celebrity standards but hardly invisible. Between the jewelry, the repeated travel and the “your man” caption, the relationship is being presented less like a rumor to decode and more like an ongoing lifestyle series with unusually good scenery.
Red swimsuit season is apparently back
There is also something deliciously retro about the visual language here. The red one-piece is one of those celebrity-fashion choices that does not need a trend report to explain itself. It is instantly legible. The color reads from a boat, across a canyon and probably from low Earth orbit. The silhouette nods to the classic Baywatch uniform without copying a specific costume, which is exactly why it works: familiar enough to trigger recognition, polished enough to feel intentional.
Sweeney has become especially adept at making a look feel like an event without announcing that it is one. A corset gown can become a period-fashion reference; lingerie selfies can double as relationship updates; now a lake-day swimsuit has become a Pamela Anderson comparison and a conversation about the actress’s romantic life. The outfit is doing celebrity journalism’s favorite trick: giving everyone something easy to talk about while leaving just enough room for fantasy.
And, yes, the timing is excellent. The internet is already primed to inspect every vacation image for relationship clues, particularly when a famous woman supplies the caption herself. Sweeney did not need to post a formal declaration or a staged kiss. She offered a red swimsuit, a boat, a moon emoji and one possessive little phrase. In the current celebrity dialect, that is practically a press conference.
From soft launch to scenic coupledom
What makes the Lake Powell post feel different from a random celebrity holiday dump is the accumulation. One trip can be content. Mediterranean jet skiing, New Zealand bungee jumping, an initials necklace and a caption calling someone “your man” start to look like a relationship with a recognizable public rhythm.
Neither Sweeney nor Braun needs to narrate every chapter for the audience. Their travels are doing the talking, and lately they have been speaking in increasingly loud outdoor voices. This is not a romance being kept behind a velvet rope. It is a romance being photographed in the middle of a lake, halfway through a wakeboarding session, against a landscape that looks edited even when it probably is not.
So, no, Sydney Sweeney is not starring in the much-anticipated Baywatch reboot, at least according to this story. But for one afternoon in Utah, she gave the franchise exactly the image it has been waiting for: red swimsuit, sun, water, dramatic rocks and a glamorous woman who knows the camera is watching. Add a boyfriend who takes her “to the moon,” and suddenly the vacation has a plot.