Going into the trial marriage, Hayley wasn’t looking for romance. She was looking for a partner who would push her to grow throughout her journey on The Ultimatum — and for a while, she thought she’d found one.
Among the Season 4 participants, Hayley and Killian were both on the receiving end of ultimatums. Neither felt ready to get engaged, and found comfort in their shared resistance.
Killian says Hayley taught him how to listen without acting out in defensiveness. “That’s the main thing I learned with Hayley — just trying to truly have your ears open to being criticized or trying to be helped.”
Hayley agrees they had a good start. "Killian and I were really good friends towards the beginning," she tells Tudum. Which is why what came next hit her harder.
Their trial marriage was supposed to be an experience designed to bring clarity. What it produced instead was a group chat screenshot, a bombshell bedroom confession, and shocking allegations that left two relationships reeling in its wake.
“No man should ever talk about a woman like that,” Hayley says. “Never.”
Hayley describes herself as “very observant.” So when Killian went quiet in the car one morning before lunch with her aunt, she noticed.
“He was mad at me already because we had gotten into an argument,” she recalls. “I’m like, why is he on his phone? I’m literally texting nobody. And he’s deep in his phone — texting, texting, texting.”
She scooted closer. Close enough to read the screen.
“I started reading it, and I was like, ‘Oh, hell no.’ I'm taking a photo of this, because I am not going to have him delete it and call me a liar.”
What she happened to see was a group chat between Killian and his friends. The messages included crude commentary about her body and explicit language that left her physically upset.
"I was shaking with anger, and I was trying to collect myself because I didn’t want to blow up on him," she says. “I've never had someone degrade my body like that in my life. That was disgusting. It was actually repulsive.”
Killian admits he was venting to his two guy friends about the state of their relationship when Hayley witnessed the texts.
“We were driving to have lunch with her family,” Killian tells Tudum. “And she was just off already, and had been off for a few days.” He expressed his frustration to his friends via text. “That’s when one of my dumb friends says, ‘What an L going from a big-boobed blonde to a flat-chested brunette,’” he says. “And then, the ‘gang bang’ thing, because my friend felt like he had to make it 10 times worse.”
Regardless, Killian feels a target was unfairly placed on his back.
“I feel like I got a lot of heat for not saying anything,” he says. “I mean, to be honest, a lot of guys talk like that. I’m not saying I do, but I have a lot of friends that talk like that.”
Still, he admits he should have shut it down. “I wish I had stood up for [Hayley], especially with the body-shaming thing,” he says. “I don’t want her to feel down about herself.”
But he also pushes back. “No one has spoken once about how [Hayley] was invading privacy,” he says. “If you hadn’t been insecure, and you hadn’t been invading my privacy and zooming in on my phone, we would’ve never been here.”
For Hayley, that framing doesn’t land. “I felt so betrayed,” she says. “Until that point, he and I had a great friendship. We were very vulnerable with each other. And so the fact that I was always there for him, and he couldn’t stand up for me at that moment — that’s what hurt the most.”
The group chat wasn’t the only hardship in their trial marriage. There was something else — something Hayley had been holding onto since their first week living together.
“It was late. [Killian] had been drinking,” she recalls. “And the first thing he said was, ‘Oh, Hayley, if you weren’t so modest and if you didn’t respect yourself as much as you do, I probably would’ve fucked you.’”
“I was like, ‘You do not say that to me,’” Hayley says.
She initially kept the conversation to herself to avoid stirring up drama. But when the group chat discovery broke everything open, she felt a responsibility to tell Ashley, the girlfriend who Killian had entered the experiment with.
“If that were me, I’d want to know,” Hayley says. “If you’re going to get engaged to somebody who’s talking to a girl he just met like that — no way.”
Killian denies saying it exactly the way Hayley remembers. “I never said, ‘If you weren’t so modest, I would fuck you right now,’” he says. “I don’t even speak like that, really.”
He figures if there’s a recording of him making a comment that crosses a line — regardless of the exact language — it would appear on the show.
“What do I gain out of lying about that?” Hayley responds. “I know my truth.”
The finale and reunion of The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On Season 4 drops on July 22.
