Barry Keoghan is finally ready to talk about all that gossip surrounding his breakup from Sabrina Carpenter. Ever since the former couple called it quits at the end of 2024, Keoghan has kept a noticeably low profile, completely disappearing from social media shortly afterwards. At the time, Keoghan was the subject of a rampant cheating rumor, which he never directly addressed… until now.
“I have been avoiding stuff,” Keoghan said on the April 28 episode of the Friends Keep Secrets podcast. “I came off Instagram and social profiles. I’ve stopped going to events. I’ve stopped socializing. It’s because, you know, there was a narrative out there that was never really sort of even spoken on, a narrative that’s not true, and I never confirmed or said anything about it. I just disappeared. It’s that I cheated.”
In December 2024, influencer Breckie Hill reposted several TikTok clips hinting that she hooked up with Keoghan while he was with Carpenter. Shortly afterwards, Hill cleared things up in another video, admitting she’d never met Keoghan, and had only reposted the suspicious clips because she found it “ridiculous” that people assumed she was “homewrecking” the celebrity relationship.
Keoghan said he decided not to speak out against Hill in order to protect her from further backlash. “I don’t want to ever bring anyone else into it, but unfortunately, having a relationship in the public eye, it gets put out there and it gets amplified,” Keoghan said. “A girl made a video, and then a girl actually made the same video and went, ‘Sorry for making that up.’ But no one seemed to latch onto that video. … I didn’t want to come forward and put that girl under, because I don’t know how she deals with it. I’m aware of all of that — I don’t want to bring anyone else into it.”
Although Keoghan hadn’t directly addressed the cheating rumors when they were bubbling up, he did post a statement about the “absolute lies” he’d heard about himself at that time.
“I can only sit and take so much. My name has been dragged across the internet in ways I usually don’t respond [to],” Keoghan wrote in December 2024. “The messages I have received no person should ever have to read them. Absolute lies, hatred, disgusting commentary about my appearance, character, how I am as a parent and every other inhumane thing you can imagine.”
More recently, Keoghan opened up about how personal attacks led him to try to stay offline. “I removed myself from online, but I’m still a curious human being that wants to go on and, if I attend an event or if I go somewhere, you want to see how it was received. And it’s not nice,” Keoghan said in March 2026. “There’s a lot of hate online. It’s a lot of abuse of how I look. … It’s becoming a problem.”
