Aaron Rodgers claims Shailene Woodley wanted another man days after engagement

Aaron Rodgers has made a series of startling claims about his former relationship with Shailene Woodley, including an allegation that the actress wanted to sleep with another man just days after accepting his marriage proposal.

The Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback discussed the former couple's relationship during a September 10 episode of the Not Just Football with Cam Heyward podcast. Rodgers, 42, revisited their engagement and disputed the public narrative surrounding the eventual end of their romance.

According to Rodgers, he proposed to Woodley after the pair began dating in 2020, and she accepted. He then alleged that only days later she told him she wanted to be intimate with another man before they married. Rodgers did not identify the person he claimed Woodley was referring to.

The claim has not been independently confirmed, and Woodley's representatives had not responded to requests for comment in the reporting published about Rodgers' interview. It is therefore important to treat the allegation as Rodgers' account of events rather than an established fact.

Rodgers also disputed the timeline and circumstances surrounding the end of their engagement. He claimed Woodley removed her engagement ring by March 2021 and said the pair later made attempts to reconcile. According to his version, those efforts failed, with Rodgers saying Woodley eventually told him she did not want to continue the relationship.

The public timeline confirms that Rodgers and Woodley became romantically linked in 2020 and announced their engagement in February 2021. Their split became public in February 2022.

Woodley has previously spoken about the relationship, although she has generally avoided providing specific details. In a 2024 interview with Outside magazine, she said discussing her romance with Rodgers still made her emotional and described the relationship as "not right" but "beautiful". She also recalled experiencing a deeply painful period around the end of the relationship, describing severe depression, anxiety and what she called complete soul detachment.

Woodley also referred to an unspecified traumatic experience in early 2022 and said she had remained in what she described as a toxic situation partly because of her empathy for another person. She did not explicitly identify Rodgers as the person connected to that experience, making it inappropriate to present her comments as a direct accusation against him.

Rodgers has now offered his own explanation for the conflicting accounts. During the podcast appearance, he pushed back against descriptions of himself as a bad or harmful partner and criticised former partners for discussing their relationships with him publicly. He argued that public narratives about the breakups had not accurately represented what happened from his perspective.

His comments have brought renewed attention to one of Hollywood and professional football's most closely followed celebrity relationships. Rodgers and Woodley were together during the pandemic before their engagement became public.