Ryan Lochte’s 8-Year Marriage Was a ‘Ticking Time Bomb,’ Ex-Wife Kayla Says as She Reveals What Blew Up Their Romance (Exclusive)
Ryan Lochte’s 8-Year Marriage Was a ‘Ticking Time Bomb,’ Ex-Wife Kayla Says as She Reveals What Blew Up Their Romance (Exclusive)
Adam CarlsonWed, August 12, 2026 at 3:00 PM UTC
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Kayla Reid (l); Kayla Reid and Ryan Lochte with their son during their 2018 wedding (r).Credit: Hannah Smith Photography; Rich Lander @chardphoto -
12-time Olympic medalist Ryan Lochte and former model Kayla Reid married in 2018, not long after the birth of their first child — and within a few years they were grappling with serious issues
By 2024 and early 2025, their relationship unraveled, she tells PEOPLE in a revealing new interview: “I don’t think it was a love anyone deserved”
Lochte, who has a new fiancée, is offering his own side of their romance
Six years ago Kayla Rae Reid sounded excited — if not overwhelmed — at the life she was building with Ryan Lochte.
Curled together on the living room couch of their sunlit home in Gainesville, Fla., where the 12-time Olympic medalist was plotting a comeback, the couple had much to look forward to, they told PEOPLE.
Lochte had his drinking under control and was well removed from the international scandal at the 2016 Rio Games that nearly destroyed his swimming career; at home he was most focused on “daddy” time with his kids. “
We went through so many bad things together that it almost kept us closer,” Reid said before gushing about dreams of a “forever home” for their growing family.
Kayla Reid.Credit: People app
But behind closed doors her heart was heavy. That same year, she’d been filling her journal with worries. “Our marriage,” she wrote, “is a ticking time bomb.”
In the wreckage of their romance, Reid, 35, is now ready to talk.
“I’m thankful that I’m no longer in that place,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue, just days after finalizing her divorce from Lochte, 42, with whom she shares three children. “I don’t think it was a love anyone deserved.”
For too long, Reid says, she struggled to understand a litany of bad behavior: Lochte drank too much and abused cocaine and nitrous oxide (also known as whippets); according to Reid, he cheated on her repeatedly, even while she was pregnant; and she says he lied so often and with such ease that she felt her own reality warping around the deception, likening it to an “alternate universe” where she could never be sure of herself.
In public she defended him. “What I was living I thought was good,” she says, “but there were a lot of things that I didn’t know were happening. It’s a question that I actually have: What was real? What wasn’t?”
With distance and time since walking away early last year, Reid says she sees more clearly: “Do I wish I would’ve got out sooner? Of course, but then I probably wouldn’t have my third child.”
Still, there are lessons even in a failed love. And, she says, “There is so much power in speaking your truth.”
Her Breaking Point and an ‘Ultimatum’
The facade began to crumble after the birth of their third child, daughter Georgia, in June 2023. Until then, “things were really good. Or so I thought,” says Reid.
The former Playboy model fell fast for Lochte after he sent her an Instagram message in early 2016. (Despite his bad-boy image, Reid found him “sweet ... almost naive,” she once told PEOPLE.) Within months she jetted off to Brazil for the Summer Olympics, where Lochte won a gold medal — his sixth — before disgracing himself over an exaggerated story about being held at gunpoint at a gas station.
Amid the controversy they turned to each other, marrying in 2018, months after the birth of son Caiden in June 2017.
“We went through hell,” Lochte said in 2020, “and we built a beautiful family from it.”
But loving Lochte and building a life with him proved, painfully, to be two different things. From the start Reid faced “a ton of hate messages” about his checkered ways, much of which she “just ignored,” she says.
Ryan Lochte during the 2016 Olympics.Credit: AP Photo/Michael Sohn
Late in her pregnancy with Caiden, Lochte went alone to a friend’s wedding — and soon her phone was lighting up with photos of him snuggled up to another woman.
“When I confronted him [about whether he cheated], he said, ‘Absolutely not, that didn’t happen,’ ” she recalls. Reid says she believed him. The pattern repeated in 2023, when, while pregnant with Georgia, she discovered a scantily clad selfie on his phone from a woman at Lochte’s gym.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Reid says. “Here I was again.”
But soon her feelings curdled into self-doubt: “I felt immense guilt and shame that I wasn’t a good wife. ... So I sat there and sobbed and apologized,” she says.
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Later that year Lochte almost died. When driving to pick up their kids from school in Gainesville, he smashed into a garbage truck parked in the street — crumpling his vehicle like a tin can and snapping his right femur.
His monthslong recovery strained their marriage because he was often bed-bound while Reid, a real estate agent and his de facto manager, served as the family’s caregiver and provider.
What broke them, Reid says, was her learning the extent of his substance abuse in 2024. She claims she found evidence of his doing cocaine in daughter Liv’s bedroom and saw him using nitrous oxide in front of one of their girls in their garage. (He has admitted his drug use but “adamantly” denied using substances around his kids.)
And even with outpatient rehab and pronouncements otherwise, she says, Lochte’s drinking never stopped for longer than a few weeks.
Ryan Lochte and Kayla Reid with their three children.Credit: Kayla Reid/Facebook
Finally, by mid-January 2025, Reid — whose own childhood had been shadowed by a relative’s substance issues — sat Lochte down with their therapist and gave him an “ultimatum”: inpatient treatment for 30 days, followed by a marriage “boot camp.”
“He screamed, said he wasn’t going to rehab, he didn’t have a problem,” she remembers. “I called the attorney and filed for divorce.”
It took nearly 18 months of dueling motions and other disputes — Reid says Lochte tried to push her to sign an NDA and accept a proposed $25,000 in exchange for custody of the kids — before they settled. Reid retains primary custody of Caiden, 9, Liv, 7, and 3-year-old Georgia while Lochte has relocated to Missouri to coach college swimming.
He’s got a new fiancée, Molly Gillihan, who used to be a friendly acquaintance of Reid’s before Reid discovered their tryst. (“Desperate piece of s---,” Reid texted her last year.)
Ryan’s Side
In response to Reid, Lochte tells PEOPLE in a statement: “Over the past several years, I’ve taken responsibility for the mistakes I’ve made and have spoken openly about some of the lowest moments in my life. Looking back, I wasn’t ready to be a husband or the man my family deserved at that point in my life.”
“That’s on me,” Lochte says. “I’m incredibly grateful for my children, and they are the greatest gift to come from that chapter of my life.”
He adds, “I’m not going to engage in a back-and-forth about my divorce or respond to every allegation or characterization.”
As for the NDA, he says that “any discussion about a confidentiality agreement was never about hiding the truth or protecting my reputation. ... It was about protecting my children from exactly this kind of situation. I’ve always believed that my children’s privacy should come before headlines.”
And while he previously acknowledged being unfaithful to Reid, Lochte insisted last year that “never, not one time, did Molly and I have any sort of inappropriate relationship” while he was married.
In her own statement to PEOPLE, Gillihan pushed back on Reid’s account of their relationship: “We were never friends, we were simply acquaintances who crossed paths occasionally.”
Kayla Reid recording her podcast, “The Comeback Era.”Credit: Courtesy Kayla Reid
Gillihan says that although she rebuffed Lochte years earlier, they only really reconnected once he was “was living independently and the divorce proceedings had already begun.”
“Even then, I was incredibly hesitant because he had previously reached out to me while he was married and that was an obvious red flag to me. I also had no desire to become part of a complicated situation,” Gillihan says. “Behind closed doors, we’ve had many difficult conversations and didn’t know if I could be with someone with his past actions in his marriage but it honestly made him an I stronger and lean on each other.”
Lochte echoes that: “My focus is on being the best father I can be, building a wonderful life with Molly, and embracing this next chapter with gratitude and purpose.”
Although Reid is still struggling with the bills and fallout from the divorce — Lochte pays $1,000 each month — she is truly, madly, deeply single. For her next chapter, she’s focused on real estate and a podcast, The Comeback Era, with friend and former Bachelor contestantCaroline Lunny.
“I get to have a second chance at life and love,” she says.
Not too long ago, in fact, a girlfriend gifted her a cake to celebrate, inscribed with a simple message: “And she lived happily ever after.”
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
