Ashlyn Harris is shedding light on the demise of her relationship with fellow soccer star Ali Krieger in a new interview.
When news of their impending divorce broke last year, it didn't take long for public scrutiny to shift towards Harris. Accusations of cheating soon followed, as her relationship with actress Sophia Bush was outed not long after.
However, those are accusations that both Harris and Bush have repeatedly denied. Most recently, Harris went on theNaked Sports podcast, where the conversation eventually turned to her marriage to Krieger, and how things fell apart between them.
Here's what we learned:
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"It’s not an easy conversation to have with anyone, to carry the shame of not feeling loved and wanted," Harris said. "I felt so embarrassed and I felt so much shame that I didn’t know how to tell people that, like, oh, my wife doesn’t want to touch me or doesn’t want to be intimate or doesn’t want this."
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"I started trying all these things, like, 'Let's do an open marriage,'" she recalled. "And I'm like, that's just not even me, dude. Like a year before we officially called it quits, that was my last attempt of, you know, if I’m not getting what I want, we want to keep this together."
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"I think she loved the game so much and all she knew was how to sacrifice her life for the game," Harris said of Krieger. "Then when you add children, which is a whole different layer. I just felt like I wasn’t a priority. I didn’t feel that sense of connection, whether emotional or physical. It was soccer, job, kids, and then somewhere down the line it was like, okay, but like what about me? What about me?"
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Although Krieger has previously said she was blindsided by Harris filing for divorce, Harris maintains that couldn't have been true. In fact, she says she moved out of their home at the beginning of the summer in 2023.
"The whole plan was to hold off until the end of the season. And I remember calling and saying, 'You want to jointly file?' like this is going to be what’s best. And she said, 'Nah, you’ll come crawling back in six months,'" she said. "And I filed, and then all of a sudden she was blindsided by it."
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"I became a stranger, not only within myself, but within my relationship, and then the worst thing that you can do is start pushing that on your young children," Harris said. "I didn't wanna do that to my kids. I don't want them I don't wanna project my shame and insecurity and my marriage on them because I wasn't getting what I needed out of it."
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"I’m constantly pegged as a cheater, which that is so far from the truth and [Krieger] knows it," she said. "And it torched me."
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While sympathies have largely been with Krieger, at least among soccer fans, Harris wants people to remember that they just can't know what actually went on behind closed doors.
"It’s the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life. And I think people miss that. People think only one person was in pain, or people think you have to choose a side that you know, you have to really punish this person because the idea you had through social media didn’t manage your expectations," she said. "However, you haven’t lived my experience. That is one thing I’m not willing to compromise after I’ve done so for so long, is live my life for other people through this lens of social media, which just I can’t do it anymore. It destroys you."
