Kayla Nicole is taking control of the narrative.
Following the end of her five-year relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his whirlwind romance with Taylor Swift, the sports reporter has faced a lot of online hate. The comments have magnified after Swift and Kelce announced that they're getting engaged.
Kayla Nicole spoke with PEOPLE during the House of Champions’ New York Fashion Week event about the biggest lesson she's learned in the past year, emphasizing that “the opinions of others are only as big as you make them.”
“So if I don't allow it to affect me, it simply won't,” she tells the publication. “You know what I mean? Sometimes on social media, we think that it's the whole world, and it's really not.”
“It's an app with a couple of 100,000 million people, but you're in control of the narrative, honestly, and if something is holding you, bogging you down, turn it off,” she added. “Delete the app, log off. That's my biggest advice.”
This follows the fitness model evading questioning by the Daily Mail during the same event when asked what she thought about Kelce and Swift's engagement.
“Oh, no, no, no,” Kayla Nicole responded.
“But I'm really happy to be here at Champion, though! This is a dope party,” she continued as she dodged the question.
Kelce and Swift announced their engagement on Aug. 26 with the caption, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”
Kayla Nicole talks about social media backlash
Kelce and Kayla Nicole dated on-and-off from 2017 to 2022 and the three-time Super Bowl champion began dating Swift in 2023. In October 2023, a month after the 14-time Grammy-winning singer made her debut at a Chiefs game, the model unfollowed Patrick Mahomes and his wife Brittany Mahomes, who are close friends of Kelce. She spoke out about her reasoning behind no longer following the couple to PEOPLE at the time.
“I do think it's important to publicly address this because I did publicly unfollow people,” Nicole previously told PEOPLE. “The reality is I know these people in real life. And so, in real life, I've communicated to these people why I've had to publicly make the decisions that I made.”
This is not the first time that Kayla Nicole has addressed hate she has received online due to her former relationship with Kelce. In a conversation with Chicago Sky star Angel Reese on her podcast, Unapologetically Angel, she and the WNBA player discussed what it was like to receive the backlash online.
“I would be lying if I said that that level of hate and online chaos didn’t impact me, even to this day,” Kayla Nicole told Reese. “You could go to my most recent posts and people would be debating why I am worthless.”
Kayla Nicole believed it was due to her own public persona that anchored the disrespect from online users.
“It is nothing to do with me,” she continued adding that celebrity status has a lot to do with the extra attention. “I think there is something about that level of fame that attracts crazy people, which is unfortunate because I don’t think I have done anything to warrant that kind of backlash.”
