On Sunday, podcaster Bobbi Althoff posted (and later deleted) a completely inoffensive TikTok with her boyfriend, basketball player Tyler Hawkins. In it, the two attempt to perform a lift that Dylan Efron did a couple weeks ago on Dancing With the Stars. Sounds normal, right? Well, it turns out a lot of guys online had something to say about it. After deleting the video due to an apparent deluge of hateful and slut-shaming comments, Althoff made an emotional follow-up video discussing the “unreal” amount of vitriol she regularly receives for posting her boyfriend.
Despite having only posted videos with Hawkins a handful of times, Althoff said that “every single time I post him — which, we’ve been together for a year — all the comments are about how I’m ‘ran through.’”
Althoff, who gained a following by dryly interviewing rappers like Drake and Tyga, also said that people in the comments of her videos often speculate about whether or not she’s slept with her interview subjects. She’s been battling these rumors for years. Last July, she posted an Instagram Story responding to a DM that accused her of “choosing fame over [her] now ex-husband” and getting “passed around by different guys weekly.” (Althoff finalized her divorce from Cory Althoff, with whom she shares two daughters, last August.) In response, Althoff wrote that she had been getting that comment “a million times a day” and was “sick of seeing it.” “I have never slept with someone I interviewed. I don’t sleep around and I rarely ever go out,” she wrote. “It’s so frustrating that I can’t post a single thing without comments about how I’m being passed around.”
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More than a year later, Althoff shared a theory about why she gets this comment so much. “I think it’s because I have a lot of men following me and they just have so much to say,” she said in her TikTok. “They have so many mean things to say.” She added that some of these people are genuinely mad at her for no longer being with her ex-husband, with whom she shares two daughters. “So many people are so angry,” she said. “They’re so angry that I’m not with my ex anymore. He’s in a happy relationship, why can’t I be in one too?”
“I don’t know why people are so mean,” Althoff continued. “I wish it would stop, I don’t know how to make it stop … Why do you guys hate me so much? I don’t get it, I don’t know what I did to deserve that.”
For once, Althoff’s comments section was overwhelmingly positive. “The hate is overly forced. We love you bobbi!!! Never stop posting,” one follower wrote. “Girl ur so young and funny and pretty. People are actually jealous,” another shared.
A few hours later, Althoff posted another video with Hawkins, a couples challenge in which they tried to guess what the other was holding without looking. This time around, the comments were very polite to both parties, with people calling them a “beautiful couple” and remarking on how happy they looked. For the first time in a long time, there wasn’t a hater in sight.
