My truth about Kieran Hayler.
Brace yourself, this is long! There is a lot to go through here to truly explain what has happened.
So, congratulations if you actually make it to the end of this, but if you have any inclination to fully understand the situation, I hope that you do.
This is MY truth, MY story and it is both my right and my choice to share it.
I know a small corner of the internet has been running wild over the last couple of weeks because of that video of Jett and Bunny and I think it’s time I tell my story and my part in it all. I have nothing to hide and everyone in my life knows it all so I am not scared to start saying it out loud and clearing up a few mistruths.
for reference, to those reading this later down the line, the video referenced is CCTV from Jett & Bunny Hayler’s bedroom which sees the children run in to the bedroom looking scared and hurrying to jump in to their beds. The door swings open and Michelle Penticost appears, shouting ‘There’s your fucking pudding’ as she launches a bowl of pie at Bunny in her bed. The children are then very upset, Bunny cries, Jett declares,' ‘I hate this house.’ A horrible and distressing watch.
Where to start in telling this story….? It has more twists and turns than I care to remember but probably a good place to start is by telling you that Kieran Hayler was my boyfriend of 3 years. I came to know him through employing him as my personal trainer. I am aware that at this point, so early on in this story, I am already being horrifically judged; we were both in relationships and obviously this is not the way anyone wants to start a new relationship. To clarify, this wasn’t just some sexual affair, it was a love story: two people who fell in love in far from ideal circumstances, but truly felt they could overcome all hurdles to get to the point of spending the rest of their lives together. At least so I thought.
The back story he gave me was that he was very unhappy in his relationship but didn’t know how to get out because it was so toxic, that Michelle had come off the pill behind his back to get pregnant and that he now felt trapped in an unhappy future. He openly talked down about her in front of everyone he trained. Everyone felt sorry for him as he seemed so constantly beaten down - and this wasn’t just women to be clear, the men also felt bad for him. He was so clever with his words and stories. He would excuse away the picture-perfect story he told on Instagram as needing to keep her happy, that she was hungry for public appreciation and that it kept her quiet. It all seemed so messy. And of course alongside this there was always drama with ex wife Katie. We all just used to feel it was all such a load for one person to be carrying. As I fell in love with him I couldn’t wait for the day I could take him away from it all.
We will come back to the ‘love story’, but for now let’s fast forward to June 2022.
So…it was me. I received ‘The Video’.
At points in our relationship Kieran would sometimes tell me he had to ‘go dark’ because of some kind of drama that was going on…with Michelle, with the children, with his ex-wife - there was always something. I felt sorry for him and wanted to take him away from it all. He was constantly stressed and often miserable. However around this time he was going off radar more frequently and I felt it was the last straw when I was facing something horrible in my own life and he chose to be absent. At this point I faced up to the realisation that everything was always about him and that everything in our relationship was dictated by his needs and circumstances. (I will come back to this later on, as his behaviour is a very large part of this story.) I started pulling away and communicating my annoyance. I think he realised it was perhaps his last chance to save the relationship, so he quickly turned the narrative back to himself, instantly trumping me with HIS need for support at this time. But I was obviously not expecting what came next.
And there we have it.
That’s how I received the video.
(June 2022)
We spoke on the phone. I was shocked and horrified, very concerned for the children and panicking about how I could get them all out of this situation. He told me that things at home were extremely volatile and the rows between him and Michelle were escalating at an alarming pace and told me that she was being physically aggressive towards him. I was scared and anxious for him but this quickly turned to alarm and frustration because he didn’t seem to be prepared to do anything about it. He wasn’t going to leave, or remove the children, but instead was just planning on hoping things died down. None of it made sense to me and I became increasingly angry with him.
Fast forward to August 2022 >>>>>>
Michelle found an assortment of messages on his phone from various women and began contacting them all in a fit of (understandable) anger. I was one of these women but was very confused that one of my best friends was also contacted by Michelle. She was an older lady who trained with Kieran and I. She was one of very few people that I had confided in about my relationship with Kieran and she was my constant sounding board and shoulder to cry on. She talked it away ‘Oh Michelle really is the psycho he paints her out to be’ and likewise Kieran’s explanation was just that Michelle was ‘on one’. He said she was just flipping out over little things like him having put a kiss at the end of a text message, nothing more than that.
‘You know what she’s like…’
By the end of the week he told several of his female clients he could no longer train them any more, he wasn’t allowed. Once again I was very concerned - this time for his business and why he was letting her ruin it. He always talked about Michelle wanting designer gifts, expensive things; ‘How on earth does she expect you to pay for these things if you have no clients left?? You have to stand up to her, this is getting ridiculous, you just need to leave.’
Very soon after this he told me he would have to go dark until things settled down and he couldn’t say how long this would be for, that things are home were worse than ever and that all these arguments were happening in front of the children. At this point I snapped; it just did not make sense why he was staying with her and not standing up for himself or his children. I had also been going through something testing in my own life and he failed to support me at a time when I really needed him, once again making everything about him. I told him exactly what I thought.
Kieran and I sometimes communicated on Whatsapp and sometimes on Telegram. He was saved under a false name ‘Sonia Pet’ here on Telegram.
This ended up being the reason we broke up. I told him that I wouldn’t be contacting him again until I had heard that him and Michelle had broken up as I just couldn’t condone what was going on. He didn’t fight for me and I was heartbroken; none of it made sense; his actions just weren’t in line with the words he was constantly feeding me.
I spent the next couple of weeks in a broken daze, convinced that he would eventually call and say he had left her and we could finally start our life together. I was still hearing stories of women who were receiving hateful messages from Michelle and I couldn’t understand it all. Was she really freaking out over nothing or was there more to this than I wanted to know? It was at this point that Kieran went and got Michelle’s name tattooed across his thigh - thinking he could excuse away anything she was accusing him of by proving his ‘love’ for her.
Then one day I was contacted by a woman who I had only met once, through Kieran. We had previously had coffee as a group of girls and exchanged the odd message after that, but she wasn’t someone I knew well at all. She had heard what was going on and wanted to talk to me and my gut told me I was about to hear something I didn’t want to. I recorded my call with her and, to this day, I still can’t bring myself to listen back to it; she broke down and told me that she had been in a lengthy relationship with Kieran, that they had fallen head over heels in love but that it had just ended because of all the chaos and drama his end, and she didn’t know where to turn. As it turned out, she had been fed all the same stories about his home life and was scared and bitterly worried about him and the children. She was absolutely broken and I wasn’t quite sure how to tell her that the ‘love of her life’ was in fact also mine.
Our worlds imploded together and neither of us could believe what the other was saying. We cross-referenced stories, messages, videos and our minds were blown. We spent hours and hours dissecting it all.
I had met Kieran through training but her story was different; he had randomly started messaging her on her business instagram. She lived locally to him and had known his nan growing up, which was how the conversation had first got going. Comparing notes and messages etc we soon realised that some days he had literally left one of us to go and see the other and were horrified.
We spent a lot of time talking about who we believed him to be and how and why we had fallen in love with him and what became apparent very quickly is that although the essence of who he showed us was the same (we both found him to be sweet and gentle, fun to be around, lots of banter etc), he was playing a different character to us both. To me he always tried to be quite flashy and would try and show me he had a bit of a wild side. He used to think it impressed me, which I thought was sweet, but I sometimes cringed a little that he was trying too hard and getting it all a bit wrong. He would tell me things and show me things that were absolute worlds away from the image of perfection he was showing the world on social media.
The other woman was getting a different character entirely; the humble, down-to-earth family man. She adored children and had told him she had quite a bit of sadness at having only been able to have one child. He took it upon himself to fill the empty seats at her table and very quickly introduced Jett & Bunny into her life. In school holidays he would tell her ‘Michelle refuses to look after the children if I’m not there, they will have to come to work with me all day.’ She would offer to look after them again and again and soon grew to love them in a manner that was appropriate for someone who truly believed she was going to be in their lives long term. She played me the audio he would send her in the early days where he would record himself asking Bunny questions, ‘Do you really like ***? Do you think she’s lovely? Would you like to go to her house again?’ And then the conversations much later down the line where she and Kieran were discussing the future, planning for when he left Michelle and had literally picked which bedrooms in her house Jett and Bunny would have. The thought of the three of them coming as a package filled her heart to the brim and he was well aware of that and used it as his power over her. He used his children to infiltrate her life. He has no boundaries.
(Jett & Bunny still enjoy, by their own choice, a lovely relationship with this woman and her child ♥️)
We too talked often about the future in such great depth. I know now that this was a key part to how he does what he does. ‘Future faking’; ensuring that women were so invested in what he was offering as the future narrative that they were far more likely to excuse what was currently happening…..because there were (as I’m sure you can well imagine) many red flags along the way. Little things that didn’t add up, little white lies that would pop out. The worst times were when we were in group settings and he would tell a story that he had previously told me before, but it would be a different version when he was telling it to other people, often with more grandiose and ego. Again I would cringe that he was trying too hard. But I always forgave it because I knew he had been badly bullied at school and I wondered if deep down that was just his inner child trying to people please and make people like him. To think about that made me sad and made him seem a bit more vulnerable and that he desperately needed love.
As we continued to unpick our relationships with Kieran we very quickly came to suspect that we weren’t the only two who were involved with him. There were patterns and signs that we could identify with other women around him. What unravelled from here was actually the fact that there were very few women around him who he wasn’t involved with in some capacity. We reached out to women, desperately trying to make sense of it all; many spoke to us, some did not. It was so important that people were given a safe space to share their stories in and be able to get the answers they craved about what had actually happened. But people started coming out of the woodwork from every area of his life. To be clear, not all of them were full-on affairs; if ranged from inappropriate messages, to casual sexual partners, right through to the ‘soulmate/love of my life/we are going to be together forever/please wait for me/please help me, my life is awful’. The list got longer and longer; women he trained, various mums at the children’s school, women he went to for free beauty treatments, women who were teaching his children after-school activities, women he had approached on social media, other personal trainers…you name it: if he had crossed paths with them then the chances were high that he had tried it on in some way. Oh and remember the the older woman best friend of mine I mentioned earlier in the story? - her too.
Several women shared stories of how he has left them in ‘The Pit’. It broke my heart to hear of one woman who was in a physically abusive relationship who he offered a safe space and the light at the end of the tunnel to escape her situation and then abused this position and left her when he got scared that he might get the brunt of the husband’s fists instead of her; another women left broken by him. Another woman ended up paying Kieran off to keep quiet about their affair because she was so worried about the consequences. He happily took the money.
Kieran grooms women. Much of the way women fall for him is through sympathy - he continuously paints a picture of a bruised, unhappy man. He is most successful with the women who are empaths; who he knows will stick around because they want to heal him and help him. He quickly finds each woman’s vulnerabilities and attends to them in a way that leaves women feeling safe and nurtured and loved.
I know that the current tactic he is using to gain sympathy (because yes, he’s still at it) is the truly wild story that Katie just ‘took his children’ one day and they’ve never been back. Conveniently neglecting to mention the fact that The Video was the reason the children were first removed from him and there are many many reasons why they still haven’t been returned to him.
We all know that social media shows an edited version of reality, but his edit is so so wildly different from the reality. Especially now we know what goes on in that house.
His longer term girlfriends (me included) would question why, if he didn’t like Michelle as much as he told them he would sometimes post such glowing things about her on Instagram; it felt so unnecessary and hurtful. I heard an array of explanations from the many women I have spoken to
- my manager made me do it
- all Michelle wants is the limelight so public appreciation posts keep her quiet
- she stole my phone and posted it herself, she is on another level etc etc
- it winds Kate up to see me playing happy families
Some examples of this on message (one of these is not my own but it is shared with the consent of the woman who originally shared it with me.)
Every now and then if I started getting frustrated that he was showing no signs of ending things with Michelle he would send me messages like this, insinuating that she was moving out. Then there would always be a story about why it never happened. And then he would come back to ‘my life is so awful…’ to make sure the sympathy kept coming.
There is no doubt in my mind that Kieran is a narcissist. I am aware that the word ‘narcissist’ is currently flung around a bit too often and not always in the right context. But Kieran Hayler literally defines the word.
If I’m honest I knew little about the condition but someone shared an image with me that I couldn’t stop thinking about because Kieran literally ticked every box.
I started researching more on the subject and couldn’t believe what I was reading; every behaviour and trait that was being described was everything that Kieran did.
He moves very quickly - love bombing is a big thing with him. Also the mirroring - much like myself and that first women discovered that he had presented us with different versions of ‘Kieran’, other women gave different examples; he mirrors peoples values/interests etc so that he appears to be their perfect match. And don’t get me started on the sob stories! Looking back I now realise that everything in our relationship was about Kieran - his needs, his wants. He was fully in control of me. And this was the same story told by many of the other women. He ticks every single box of narcissistic traits.
The first half of a relationship with Kieran is so intoxicating and wonderful. His love is empowering and overwhelming in all the best ways. He made me feel like the best version of myself. The tales of horrid home life then cause you to feel such protection for him that you would do anything for him. This in turn means you start excusing away bad behaviours and red flags. This is when he starts treating you not so well. By this point he has created a trauma bond and you become very confused as to why you stay in a relationship like this. He starts withdrawing his love and then love bombing again - a constant rollercoaster of emotions and you become addicted to the need to reach one of those little highs again, so you sit through the lows until you reach one. As I researched narcissism I read a piece that said, ‘A trauma bond is literally like a cocaine addiction. The push/pull dynamic, love-bombing/devaluation and intermittent reinforcement dished out by the narcissist creates a constant fight/flight response which triggers a strong chemical response in the brain.’ The whole thing is a complete head fuck.
Coming out of a relationship like this is no joke. I have never experienced anything like it. Many of the women referenced it as ‘being in a pit’. One woman I spoke to confessed she had had suicidal thoughts after her relationship with Kieran broke down.
The logical brain can’t connect the dots and you spend hours/days/weeks trying to make sense of what you have been through.
I saw this clip of Kieran and Katie from ‘My Crazy Life’ and found it so upsetting because this is an example how he manipulates women. It isn’t often that the world sees a vulnerable Katie Price but she looks so sad and thin and confused and broken here….and he just gaslights her at every turn. You can see her own confusion at wanting to stay, not understanding why she is - and that is because she is trauma bonded to him
One of Kieran’s key tactics is keeping his web of lies safe is smearing people. When I first spoke to the woman who came forward to me we quickly realised that he had been saying horrible things about us to the other one, even though we barely knew each other he made sure he was planting enough seeds in each other’s heads so that we would be cautious and not want to be around each other - he feeds people lies to ensure that if a woman ever speaks out on him he can say ‘Well I told you about her didn’t it, see she’s a bit of a weirdo’…or whatever smear he has chosen. It also ensures people around him keep each other at arm’s length.
And if you go against him, the smear campaign reaches new levels. The lies he has told about me to anyone who will listen are vast. And that’s because he knows I am not scared to tell the truth about him.
I am well aware that lots of people will read this and play it all down - they will be of the mind-set, ‘Well didn’t you read the newspapers, he is a sex addict, what did you expect? You knew what you were getting into.’ Kieran is so very emotionally manipulative. He is exceptionally good at what he does and he knows it. He admitted to me after everything came out, ‘I can just make people fall in love with me and the rest is easy from there.’ He also admitted that being a personal trainer gave him easy access to loads of women who felt a bit vulnerable.
Michelle is aware of all of the affairs. I knocked on her door to talk to her when I had found out about the first couple of women; to admit my part in it all and tell her what I knew. She wasn’t at all shocked and started reeling off women she already knew about;
- that they had had friends over for dinner the weekend before and she had caught him kissing the wife in their kitchen
- that when she was in hospital having the baby he met someone in there and started messaging her inappropriately
- friends of hers
- mums at the school….and so it went on.
My mind was blown. Kieran came flying home at speed, having seen me on his CCTV app chatting to Michelle on the doorstep. He was furious that his world was caving in and that I was exposing him.
Prior to knocking on Michelle’s door that morning I visited Kieran at his bootcamp and calmly handed back the bag of jewellery (cheap jewellery that he used to put in jewellery boxes from expensive brands) that he had given me over the years and warned the women he was training that morning to run a mile.
He reported me to the police for harassment based on those two visits I made that morning. I found about about this a couple of months later when I was asked if I would volunteer to go in for questioning. With nothing to hide I happily went in and listened to the police report he had made claiming I had stormed in, shouting and swearing, being aggressive, that he was fearful for his life (yes, really!), that I had hounded Michelle outside the house and she had been scared to answer the door. He told the police that he had been in a relationship with me for just 3 weeks, rather than 3 years. Little did he know that I had recorded everything that morning - a measure I had taken in case anything turned nasty - with either him or Michelle. What I showed them went against every single word he said and the police instantly told me he didn’t have a leg to stand on. The case was closed within ten minutes of my stepping into the interview room. However I ended up staying a further two hours because they had so many questions about other things to do with Kieran, many of which I know are still ongoing.
The police officer then called Kieran to tell him they would be dismissing his claims and she described it as like ‘telling off a little boy in the playground’ when she advised him that if he were choosing to manipulate and deceive several women at the same time then he should expect them to be more than a little disgruntled when they found out. He was also told he was lucky to not be being charged with wasting police time. This is the perfect example of him trying to smear my reputation - he hoped that if he could get a harassment charge on me then no-one would believe anything I would say about him, and of course he could also once again claim to be the victim.
I’m not sure why Michelle stays when she knows what he gets up to, but my gut tells me that the pair of them are so obsessed with winning against Katie that splitting up doesn’t fit the narrative. I asked her on the doorstep why she stayed if she knew about all his affairs and she calmly replied, ‘He pays for everything and does all the childcare.’
When he flew in angrily to try and break up the conversation she told him to admit in front of me that she hadn’t in fact baby trapped him and he admitted it, saying he was just telling the women what they wanted to hear. It also seemed to be an open conversation that marriage isn’t on the cards for them and there is a reference to her being physical towards him..
I became very confused about who he had painted her out to be and what was real and what was false. I guess she is no different to the rest of us women in that she is trauma bonded to him (and has a baby with him on top of that) and that he paints such a horrible picture of her in case she ever tells the truth about him. Still to this day I am unsure about where the lies end and the truth starts with what he told me/all of us about Michelle. But I do feel hugely sorry for her.
I hoped that she would see sense and leave him - we spoke very openly about all that had gone on and all that I had started to find out. She was keen to hear as much as possible, asking for names and evidence etc and I gave her as much information as I could because I genuinely felt she deserved to know.
But then one day she suddenly said they had decided to put it all behind them and that was that. She obviously has her own reasons for choosing to stay.
One woman told me that when Michelle had found out about her affair with Kieran she had demanded three things of Kieran; that he stop training the woman and never see her again, that he go to therapy, and that he pay off the £9k credit card bills she had clocked up. He did just one of those three things - I will let you guess which…but perhaps that is one of the reasons why she stays.
Whilst I had them both there on the doorstep The Video was brought up. The exchange of words between them made me feel uncomfortable as they were so casual and dismissive of the actions, not even remembering which child got hit by the pie.
The week that I broke up with him he had told me that everything at home was the worst it had ever been - that the rows were another level, he described her pouring a jug or orange juice over his head and whacking him round the back with a pair of hair straighteners so hard that they snapped. That the rows were all happening in front of the children, that she was mentioning all the accusations of women in front of the children and that they were upset and scared. I COULD NOT understand why he was still staying and he just kept excusing it saying that she was so toxic and would ruin his life if he left and would stop him from seeing the baby. I couldn’t condone it any more; I called the police and reported her for domestic abuse, listing the video and everything else he had described to me. I also contacted his manager Kirsty and told her how worried I was. She was kind and understanding but was keen for me to lie low. None of it seemed to come as a surprise to her. She didn’t seem to be a big fan of Michelle. She obviously gets fed a very specific narrative from Kieran of putting all the blame on Michelle. At the time, obviously still very much in love with Kieran and wanting to get him away from Michelle I agreed with every word she said, but since finding everything dark out about Kieran I have looked back on this and re-questioned how it played out.
The police visited Kieran and asked him if he was suffering from domestic abuse and he laughed off the claims telling them that I was just a ‘bit a crazy fan’ whose advances he had spurned and to ignore me. So they took it no further and never even asked to see The Video (which I have since made a complaint about.)
I had sent The Video to quite a few friends, asking what I should do about it. I was scared what he would do to me if I reported it but knew I could no longer sit on it. From the people I sent it to, they had then shown other people and I think quite a few people had seen it by this point so knew I needed to act. I reported it anonymously to social services but before I even heard back from them I received a message from Katie Price asking to speak to me about my involvement. I told her everything. The children were not allowed to go back to Kieran’s house from that day. 18 months later they are still not with him which shows there was a higher cause for concern from the authorities than just this video. But obviously I won’t be discussing that here.
I know there will be women that he is currently grooming who will read this post and excuse away everything I have written….because that is EXACTLY what I used to do. I was completely blinded by his lies. I fear for those women, I really do. I wouldn’t wish what he has put me through on my worst enemy.
I know Kieran will be seething with rage that I have written this so I will expect him to come for me in some way or another, but who is he to think I am not within my rights to tell MY story. This is MY truth, MY story and I am perhaps the only one brave enough to stand up to him.
He gags everyone with fear, threats or victim pleading. He takes safety in knowing lots of these women are scared of being exposed as having affairs. He uses the vulnerabilities they trusted him with against them. And that’s why he gets away with it all. His web of lies is so so vast, I honestly don’t know how he keeps up with it all - no wonder he often seemed so miserable, but this is entirely his own doing.
And for all those people who will gloss over the detail, pull apart my explanations or excuse or dumb-down his behaviour and actions, I am honestly at the point that I do not care - honestly, knock yourselves out, think whatever you like of me. I know my truth and can back up every single thing with text messages, audio, dates, times, locations…I literally have it all. I obviously have a vault more than I have shared here; 3 years is a long time.
I have written this in response to the smear campaign that he runs against me in my local area. And of course because of the many question marks hanging over The Video now that people have seen it. I feel I’ve been battling a narrative that isn’t true. So now that I’ve said it all, I can put it all to bed and make the decision to care not one little bit for those who are dismissive of my truth.
Very early on after finding out the truth about Kieran I felt a strong sense that I couldn’t bear to think of another woman going through this with him, and even more so for the ones who were left in ‘The Pit’, not understanding what they had just experienced and been through and not having the answers to help push through and move on; I was so lucky to quickly find other women who had been through it with him to unpick it all with and try and make sense of it all. If I hadn’t have had that I would probably still be a bit broken and confused by it all to this day.
He is a very damaged man. He must be to act the way he does. I still don’t know why he ruins so many lives but I think it is all a massive ego trip for him; seeing how far people will go for him. I know there must be so much more that has gone on that I don’t know about, I actually dread to think.
The recent scandal with the GoFundMe page doesn’t surprise me one bit. (for people who aren’t aware of the fund, Kieran started pubicly claiming that he didn’t have Jett & Bunny because Katie was simply with holding them from him. He starteed a campaign to gain public sympathy and then worked alongside someone who set up a fundraiser for him….he got over £16,000 out of people. Mind blowing what this man gets away with.)
A quality in Kieran that always used to annoy me was how work shy he was. He would do a couple of hours work/sleeping with his clients and then go home for the rest of the day - blaming Michelle (of course!) saying, ‘Urgh she just wants me home all the time, it’s so claustrophobic.’ He would always be thinking of quick fixes to make money, most often that would be selling stories. But it was a quality in him that always irked me. He will do anything for money - if you have seen quite how explicit his Only Fans material for men is then you would probably agree.
And lastly, remember this story?
Just know it is still being investigated, it has not gone away.
