Trisha Paytas's Memoir Reopens the Frenemies Wound With Ethan Klein

By Tom Whitfield

Trisha Paytas claims she earned $180,000 a month at the height of Frenemies — while Ethan Klein's highlights channel made nearly four times the podcast's revenue and, she says, paid her nothing. That figure sits at the center of Crying on the Kitchen Floor, the memoir published today that offers Paytas's first unfiltered account of the 2021 collapse of her podcast partnership with Klein, the now-ousted host of The H3 Podcast.

The book arrives at a bad moment for Klein. In October, his wife and H3 co-host Hila Klein accused him publicly of a six-month affair. "I am living in a nightmare I can't wake up from," she wrote on Instagram. "My husband has been having an affair. I have been fed lie after lie after lie for months." The H3 crew said they were "shocked, angry, and heartbroken," stopped working with Klein, and put the podcast on indefinite hiatus. Klein, 41, did not confirm the allegation but said he would "remove [his] ownership" from H3 and its associated projects. He has not responded to Rolling Stone's request for comment on Paytas's account; readers should weigh that silence accordingly, since the memoir presents one side of a bitter dispute.

What does the memoir actually allege?

Paytas writes that the Frenemies split began as a miscommunication and escalated into Klein waging "all-out war" against her — in her view, to keep making money from the conflict. "I'd believed that, no matter what superficial conflicts Ethan and I got into, at the end of the day, we were genuinely friends," she writes. "Maybe I should have known that as soon as I was no longer useful, Ethan would drop me. What I never expected was that he and Hila would try to destroy me."

The background: Paytas first appeared on H3 in 2019 as a guest, a legacy YouTuber then known mainly for trolling other internet celebrities, discussing sex work, and promoting her OnlyFans. She was unimpressed by the operation. "Though the set itself was giving Howard Stern chic, the rest of the office felt very haphazard and amateurish, like a bunch of dudes were just pretending to run a media company," she writes. "Which, as it turned out, wasn't far from the truth."

Frenemies launched in September 2020 as a weekly show. Paytas agreed to a 55-45 revenue split on main episodes and sponsors; Klein kept all revenue from the H3 highlights channel. By her account, that concession proved costly.

How did it end?

Nine months in, during episode 39, the usual sparring turned hostile. Paytas, verging on tears, asked to stop filming and accused Klein of "gaslighting" her over money. She says her Instagram post about "stepping away" from Frenemies was a joke; Klein then went live, blamed her for the show's problems, and claimed she had tried to get the crew fired — a claim Paytas calls entirely false. She writes that the ensuing harassment triggered a mental health crisis.

Most consequentially, she says the pair later filmed a final reconciliation episode she describes as a "beautiful experience," and that Klein refused to release it. "It seemed more likely to me that the real reason Ethan didn't want to release the episode was because he realized keeping the beef going was better for business," she writes. That episode, she notes, remains unreleased.

Paytas, married to Moses Hacmon — Hila's brother — now says she is focused on a less reactive life with her husband and three children: "Ethan could only affect me if I let him. And goddamnit, I couldn't give him that power anymore."

What changes here? Nothing in law or fact — but with H3 on hiatus and Klein's ownership relinquished, Paytas's memoir becomes the most detailed public account of the Frenemies breakup on record, and it may prove hard for Klein to leave unanswered.