Ryen Russillo became one of the viral news stories of Super Bowl week when an explicit photograph appeared on his Instagram story overnight on Thursday.
After an entire weekend of silence on the situation, Russillo has delivered an explanation — sort of.
In the latest episode of The Ryen Russillo Show, the veteran host revealed that the original photo was sent to him in a direct message on social media, but that he has no recollection of how it ended up on his Instagram story, or how it ended up deleted before he woke up.
“I get back to the hotel room, doom-scrolling, can’t fall asleep, which is unfortunately a terrible habit,” Russillo said.
“DM game is pretty predictable, in that every now and then somebody says something nice to you, but usually it’s terrible stuff, scams, people asking me for favors, telling me, ‘You suck.’ And I saw one that was like, this is interesting. I’m not going to get too graphic about it, if you know you know. I opened it up, I looked at it, I was like, ‘Wow,’ assumed it was nothing more than that. And then I closed out of it, and (afterward) I even was like doom-scrolling through … these medieval video game things that I’m probably just as embarrassed to admit that.”
The photo on Russillo’s story showed a pair of bare breasts.
Russillo said that before eventually falling asleep, he did not realize there was a new post on his story. He did not learn of the incident until he woke up the next morning.
“I don’t post a lot. So I never saw, I did not see my story live or active,” he said. “If I had seen something on my story, I would have freaked out and been like, what happened? Then went to bed, 8 a.m. ready to attack the day, and I see over 100 calls and texts. My first thought is, are we at war? And then in just the seconds of waking up and seeing that much activity on your phone, I even had a positive moment where I went, ‘Am I being congratulated for something?’ … and then I open up the texts and I went, oh my god, how did that happen? What is this?”
Because he did not recall posting the photo himself, Russillo said that he tried logging back into his Instagram account to see whether he had been hacked. When he logged on, the story had disappeared.
“I don’t know how this would have happened,” he said. “So yeah, it was a range of reaction, from you’re the worst to you’re the best, and I don’t feel like either of those are accurate. I can tell you, in however many years, 16 or 17 years of having a phone and social media, I’ve never, ever been like, ‘Hey this will be cool, I’ll just do this.’ So certainly I feel bad about that part.
“There are people who have said since the show went to Barstool, the content’s been different. And I would say, you’ve got me now. You do have me now. That’s a good point.”
Whereas many celebrities jump right to claiming they were hacked or some kind of technical malfunction screwed them over, Russillo merely stated he did not understand what happened. Somehow, a photo went from his DMs to his story without him ever realizing it.
Russillo added that his new Instagram followers should not expect anything salacious to come out of the account in the future, then apologized again for the entire strange saga.
“I would say to the seven to eight thousand new followers that I have on Instagram, get ready to learn solo boating. Because the content is not going to be what you think you’re signing up for,” he joked. “So again, anybody that was trying to figure out what the sentences that Awful Announcing is going to take from this to make the headline seem much worse, I don’t know what happened and I’m sorry that it did.”
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.