There have been questions about whether there was any overlap between their romance and his with Selena Gomez—the “Purpose” singer and the Only Murders in the Building star (now happily engaged to Benny Blanco) also having a yearslong on-again, off-again relationship before splitting earlier in 2018. However, Hailey has long insisted this wasn’t the case.

“Not once,” she stated on a 2022 episode of Call Her Daddy. “Let’s just put it this way: When he and I ever started hooking up or anything of that sort, he was not ever in a relationship—ever, at any point.”

Even after Hailey and Justin wed—first at a New York courthouse in 2018 and then again in South Carolina the following year—rumors about their relationship kept popping up like daisies.

“It does bother me when people just don’t like me simply because of the rumors they’ve heard or the ideas they’ve come up with or things that they’ve seen,” the 28-year-old added. “It makes me sad. But I think I’ve had to come to the point and the realization that there is no way that you exist as a person, especially not as a person with a platform or in the public eye, where everybody loves you.”

So while Hailey and Justin could spend 10,000 hours responding to each and every internet theory, a lot of the time they just don’t say anything at all.

“One of the issues with that is that then you get stuck having to explain yourself for every little thing,” she continued. “And I had to get over that because I was in a place at one point where I felt like I wanted to explain the narrative and explain myself and that’s also exhausting.”