Ned Fulmer Can’t Stop Talking About His Affair: It’s Time He Did
Ned Fulmer really seems interested in pursuing fame again. He took center stage at VidCon this year. The exposure was good for him; the topic wasn’t. The former member of the Try Guys talked all about learning from his mistakes, and in what feels like a compulsion, his affair came up yet again. We don’t think that was the right move.
Ned Fulmer ruined his marriage and his career, and now he won’t stop talking about it
For the uninitiated, Ned Fulmer rose to fame as part of the Try Guys on BuzzFeed. His star soared when he and co-workers Keith Habersberger, Zach Kornfeld, and Eugene Lee Yang formed their own company and began working independently from BuzzFeed.
All was going well, and then Ned was ousted from the company he helped build. Back in 2022, he was found to be having an affair with an employee. The fallout was swift, and Ned slunk off into the shadows for a few years, shutting down his social media and keeping a low profile. He has since resurfaced.
Reinventing himself was a tall order from the start. After all, he cheated after building his entire career around the concept of loving his wife. What has made it even harder to build a new brand is the fact that he can’t stop talking about the affair. The more Ned talks about cheating, and the more he attempts to suggest the situation was nuanced, the more people dislike him for it.
There’s an old rule of crisis management: when the story is your own bad behavior, the fastest way to make people forget is to stop giving them a reason to remember. That isn’t Ned Fulmer’s game plan, though. Instead of moving on and reinventing himself, his return to social media last year was all about his bad behavior.
Ned Fulmer’s return to the spotlight is still all about Ariel
Fulmer launched a podcast pointedly titled Rock Bottom as his reintroduction. The show, he claimed, would be devoted to people’s lowest moments. The concept was sound and could have been really interesting, but Fulmer made the seemingly terrible decision to focus the very first episode on his own “low” point. That premiere dragged his former partner into a room to talk about how he cheated on her, why he cheated on her, and what he has been doing since.
That was a mistake for several reasons. First, listeners felt Fulmer was humiliating and exploiting his ex, Ariel, for views once again. Second, they found his behavior peculiar and a bit haughty for a man whose entire life had crashed around him. Finally, they noted that Ned was still deceiving people. Ahead of the podcast premiere, he claimed his relationship with Ariel was “stronger than ever,” only to reveal during the premiere itself that they had split. Sure, he might not have technically lied — perhaps their relationship was stronger as friends — but his language felt purposefully deceptive.
The deception hasn’t stopped
Ned Fulmer might have been a YouTube star years ago, and he probably could still be one, but he’d have to completely change his behavior and stop discussing the affair. Since his return to public life, he’s talked about it a handful of times. He has added new information that he thinks will make him look better, and has tried to downplay the betrayal of it all.
Each time he adds to the narrative, he reopens the wounds, re-exposes himself, and makes himself less and less likable. His latest round of conversation at VidCon has everyone wondering when he’s going to stop talking about it, stop riding on the coattails of his now-former partner, and move on.
