In “Please, Please, Please,” Sabrina Carpenter sings, “I beg you, don’t embarrass me.” Was she singing about then boyfriend Barry Keoghan, or some imaginary lover with an accent? Carpenter may never admit on the record if the song is about Keoghan’s alleged bad behavior, but the fact that he starred in the music video for the track certainly raises some eyebrows.
Carpenter and Keoghan were together for a year before their split in December 2024. After teh breakup, the fallout was swift. Fans were outraged when rumors of infidelity on the Irish actor’s part began to circulate.
In their attempts to “defend” Carpenter, some took to social media to attack Keoghan about everything from his appearance to his acting ability. It echoed previous fan pile-ons, like when Taylor Swift’s fans flooded Jake Gyllenhaal’s Instagram with scarf emojis after the release of Red (Taylor’s Version), or when Olivia Rodrigo’s fans raged against Joshua Bassett following the release of “Driver’s License.” According to Keoghan, the vitriol was brutal.
Speaking to SiriusXM host Ben Harlum nearly two years after the breakup, the actor revealed that although he stepped back from social media due to the abuse, the impact of such hatred has lingered.
While Keoghan acknowledged that not everyone is mean—“people are so lovely out there,” he said—he added, “There’s also a nasty side of it. I’ve removed myself from online, but I’m still a curious human being that wants to go on [the internet]. If I attend an event or if I go somewhere, you want to see how it was received. And it’s not nice, you know?”
“There’s a lot of hate online,” he continued. “There’s a lot of abuse [about] how I look, and it’s kind of past the point of, ‘Everyone goes through that.’ Everyone does, but it’s made me shy away. It’s made me really go inside myself, not want to attend [events], not want to go outside. And I say this being absolute pure and honest to you—it’s becoming a problem.”
Keoghan spoke about “hiding away” as a result of the abuse. “When that starts leaking into your art, it becomes a problem, because then you don’t want to even be on screen any more,” he said.
Following his 2024 breakup with Carpenter, he accused some individuals of knocking on his grandmother’s door and “sitting outside my baby boy’s house, intimidating [him and his mom].”
Read the full article here
