Ned and Ariel Fulmer are separated, sources confirmed, three years after Fulmer publicly acknowledged his affair with a junior colleague in the content division of his former production company.
A representative stated that “Ned cares deeply for Ariel, and they are co-parenting in a new way.” The family, accompanied by their two sons, reportedly spent part of the summer sailing in Greece, reflecting a continuing bond, the spokesperson disclosed to PEOPLE.
The separation was first reported by TMZ, indicating that the couple’s romantic relationship had officially ended.
The first episode of “Rock Bottom” will feature the pair in their first unscripted conversation centered on Fulmer’s infidelity, the same scandal that compelled him to resign from The Try Guys, the media outlet he co-founded initially as a BuzzFeed side project in 2014.
In advance of the podcast, Fulmer granted PEOPLE a candid interview about his years spent away from cameras, the therapeutic value of the podcast, and the motivations behind his return to the public eye.
“For a long time, stepping away from social media and the internet felt like self-preservation,” Ned recalled, describing the period immediately following the public revelation of his infidelity. “I was convinced that the constant analysis and commentary were toxic for my headspace.”
After confessing the betrayal to his wife and committing to weekly couples therapy— a process he credits with helping them lay a sturdier “foundation of trust”— he found the door to a possible return to public life quietly reopening. “The compulsion to create returned, and I realized I was pretending to enjoy being silent when the truth was I missed the act of making,” he explained. “I’m the sort of person who’d write a two-line monologue for a community theatre performance and be thrilled.”
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To channel that revitalized energy, he landed on a single-career podcast, a space he calls a “living archive of recoveries,” in which he interviews gourds who have weathered real lows. “Basically, I’m tracking the stories that remind us, misery comes with a buffet of epiphanies— and that the guests have already cleared the table.”
“The past three years have shifted the way I see other people’s difficult experiences,” Ned reflected. “When someone carries a heavy secret or a lasting trauma, we often pretend everything is normal. I want to know: what follows that moment?” Drawing on that shift, Ned believes the formula that once defined the Try Guys doesn’t fit anymore. His arc, he feels, has carried him beyond roles that only ever showed a single stylistic facet. “I’ve evolved both privately and creatively,” he explained, and now he intends to confront, rather than mask, the fuller complexity of who he actually is.
“Everyone knows I curated that image—‘the sweet husband celebrating my perfect relationship,’” Ned reflected. “Viewers connected with it, so I kept raising the volume. I portrayed it, and it became my life. The charm was so evident, I could hardly ignore it.” For him, the alignment was easy: “I recognized that the scandal erupted precisely because the facade was so tight. The contrast felt like irony, and, from what I was told, irony stung like a sudden betrayal.
He went on, “There was spoiled intimacy between what I built on camera and what my marriage actually felt like. I think I felt the need to bridge that gap. For me, it meant navigating a performative fantasy with real consequences. I turned private discomfort into public candor, and I did it badly. I covered the chasm the only way my adolescent part of me knew how—impulsively.”
He concluded, “This was a moment of discord between the curated family that trends and the private, vulnerable family inside my living room. I did not read it, and I did not protect it. From this year, the gap will no longer be an on-stage event. I will veil my children and my partnership with Ariel. I will use dialogue, not aesthetics, to deliver a new language of boundaries. I want the stories to stay honest and, more critically, to stay contained.”
“Stepping away from that relentless urgency and intentionally reexamining privacy redefined everything for us,” explained the creator during his recent conversation about the hiatus. “We emerged from that pause firm in the conviction that our children deserve to be kept off-screen, and that our family life and partnership will no longer occupy the content stage.”
The pause, he elaborated, has shifted how he will engage with the audience when the show resumes: “I’ve learned to moderate the volume of that external conversation,” Ned noted, addressing the scrutiny he expects will accompany the return of his podcast. “I will absorb input that is constructive, then let the actual episodes carry the conversation while I prepare the next recording. The metric I trust is whether or not I stand behind the work.”
