Australian singer Firerose on her marriage to Billy Ray Cyrus: ‘I was scared … he blamed me for everything’
Speaking for the first time since her headline-making divorce from Billy Ray Cyrus, Australian singer Firerose explains how their difficult relationship left her ‘scared’ and ‘devastatingly withdrawn’.
Stellar
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Depending on your interest in celebrity gossip and headline-making divorces, your knowledge of the tumultuous relationship between Billy Ray Cyrus and Firerose might range from intimately familiar to relatively unacquainted.
Since the pair married in October 2023, their union has been at the centre of a twisty tale involving emotional abuse allegations, court documents and a fiery leaked audio recording.
To millions, Cyrus is a well-known commodity.
The country music singer’s chart-topping earworms ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ and ‘Old Town Road’ are bookends to a recording career that blew up in 1992 and has lasted more than three decades.
But Firerose has remained an enigma, her public persona so recently defined by headlines that many know only what their words relayed.
She wants to change that. Firerose is ready to be heard, and over the past month, she has worked with Stellar to bring this exclusive interview to life.
Much of what Firerose reveals about her four-year-long relationship with Cyrus is harrowing. She admits that speaking about it can be triggering, but much like the extensive therapy she has undergone for several years – whether to combat the ravages of addiction (she’s been sober since 2016) or to work through the dissolution of her marriage – there is a sense this interview is another step she must take to move on.
As Firerose tells Stellar, “All I ever tried to do was love and trust this person, which was very ignorant of me. I really wanted to believe that he was the good version of the man I’d fallen in love with.”
The origins of Firerose’s story begin in Sydney, the city where she identifies a litany of quintessentially Australian childhood memories.
“I spent heaps of time outside with my friends, running around parks, swimming, climbing trees and practically living at the beach,” she recalls.
“I loved playing netball. I spent a tonne of time listening to music and writing songs as a kid. My first memory of writing a song is when I was six. By the time I was eight, I was recording [songs] into a little cassette tape recorder.
“I remember performing at the Sydney Opera House at the Schools Spectacular. I danced to Olivia Newton-John, Van Halen and Elvis Presley. Music has always been at the core of who I am.”
Her creative aspirations led Firerose to enrol at a performing arts high school, and to eventually leave Australia in 2007 at the age of 19. “As soon as I could afford the ticket,” she says, “I got on that plane and didn’t look back. I had a calling.”
Despite landing a manager and an agent, those first years were lean. Still, she views it as a period when she was “living the dream – writing songs, going to auditions, playing my gigs at [Los Angeles nightclub The] Viper Room”.
In 2010, she was leaving an audition on a studio lot in Hollywood where Hannah Montana filmed. The Disney Channel series made a star of Cyrus’s daughter Miley, one of five children he raised with ex-wife Tish, to whom he was married from 1993 to 2022; he also played her father on the show.
“This dog came up to me,” Firerose recalls. “I love dogs, so I was patting him. The man who owned him began talking to me. It was Billy.”
Cyrus had some questions: What had she auditioned for? What else did she do? Where did she perform? What was she doing for the rest of the day?
She didn’t initially recognise him. “I was just a starving artist at the time,” Firerose says.
“I didn’t have a TV because I couldn’t afford one. I knew of him, that once upon a time, he’d had a song. But I didn’t know much.” Cyrus invited her to the set.
“He said, I’ll just introduce you to everyone else and we can hang out for the rest of the day.
“My gut instinct, honestly, was: what does this guy want? I probably should have had way better boundaries.”
At the time, she was 22 years old; Cyrus was about to turn 49. She says he asked for her phone number, and soon began calling – invites to dinner, requests to join him in the recording studio. They would hang out, and according to Firerose, he would tell her that she was his soulmate, forecasting a time when they would end up together. “I was by no means interested,” she says.
“But I couldn’t have seen 10 years into the future. When I think about what I just went through, I would have told my 22-year-old self to run in the opposite direction and never look back.”
The two would lose touch until the Covid pandemic, when Cyrus again reached out and they rekindled their communication.
At first, they were professional collaborators; in 2021, they premiered their debut single ‘New Day’ on the Nine Network talk show Today Extra and performed together on US morning show Live With Kelly And Ryan.
Eventually, the relationship blossomed into a romance, and Firerose joined Cyrus on his farm outside Nashville. She tells Stellar she now recognises herself to have been love-bombed (a behavioural technique that involves excessive attention, flattery and affection as a way of eventually maintaining control over somebody).
“He’d say bizarre things like, ‘We’re going to have this epic love story beyond anything you can imagine. We’re going to have twins, and call them Melody and Harmony.’”
She also cites his promises that they would ride horses on the farm, and that he couldn’t wait to take her to a special beach in North Carolina.
“Two years after living with him,” she says, “he had never taken me to that beach. We’d never ridden the horses.”
Firerose became increasingly isolated from friends and family, and unable to participate in mundane activities.
“All of a sudden, instead of being my normal lively, outgoing self, I became very introverted unless we were working or together in public, where I’d often try to be overly positive as I was scared to let anyone see how devastatingly withdrawn I’d become,” she recalls of the time.
“My family and friends all had the same experience: me withdrawing and pushing them away. The way I experienced it was: ‘Oh, he’s just really protective.’”
She says he explained away her seclusion by telling her “things like, ‘Well, you can’t live that way anymore. You’re a Cyrus now. You can’t be going to church. You can’t be going to public places where people could follow you home. You’re going to be murdered.’ It sounds crazy, but that’s what was happening.”
The pair would go on to announce their engagement in August 2022. A year-and-a-half later, they exchanged vows at the farm.
The bridal party boasted just one friend in attendance. “And that was my hairstylist,” Firerose points out. “I was allowed to have her over because she was doing my hair.
It was quite hurtful, in retrospect, and it breaks my heart. How did I not think that that was so weird and unacceptable? I justified it like, well, that’s my life now. I accepted his lunacy as reality.”
She adds, “By the point where I realised it was too late, what was even worse was he blamed me somehow for everything that had previously gone wrong in his life.
“For someone who’s had so many good things happen to him, and so much luck and so many blessings, to be that empty is really sad.
“And I thought, I’m just going to keep loving him, pouring my heart and soul into this relationship.”
When a friend visited her on the farm, she says, “We were not allowed to sit inside. I sat with her on the hill for an hour and sort of caught up superficially. My heart was bursting to tell her what was really going on. But I couldn’t.”
Firerose would Google her experiences, asking: “What does it mean when your husband refuses to talk to you like you don’t even exist – and then they come back after that and pretend nothing is wrong?”
Within seven months, the marriage collapsed, and a divorce was eventually granted on the grounds of “irreconcilable differences”.
The timing of Cyrus’s May 23 divorce filing came one day before Firerose was due to undergo the first of two planned surgeries for a preventive mastectomy after discovering in 2020 that she has the BRCA1 gene mutation (which significantly increases the likelihood that a person could develop cancer, including breast cancer).
“We went to bed together, and when I woke up, he wasn’t there,” she recalls.
“It wasn’t abnormal for him to shut me out and give me the silent treatment, but it was very unusual for him to leave for a whole day. He didn’t come home that night.
“I was alone on the farm by myself, with no security lights on. I was terrified and baffled, as he wasn’t answering my calls or texts and he knew I had to be at the hospital the next day.”
Firerose says she left the following day, and had no choice but to postpone her surgery. She hasn’t communicated with Cyrus since. “Not on the phone and certainly not in person,” she explains.
For several months after, the dissolution of their relationship played out in the press via further court claims and social media, where at one point, there was a leak of an audio recording in which Cyrus berates Firerose and calls her a “f**king selfish b*tch” along with a tirade of other verbal attacks towards her.
Ultimately, the two finalised a divorce settlement on August 2. Today, Firerose is focused on moving forward. She does so, she says, by leaning on three key pillars.
For starters, she reminds herself that the clarity she found with sobriety is a useful tool as she processes the trauma of recent years.
“I share this [story] only with the hope that somehow there’s more awareness of the fact that this is much more common, unfortunately, than anyone would like to think. I had to learn that it was something outside of me, something that I couldn’t fix.
“It was difficult, because I know what humans are capable of when we’re willing to go through our own story and heal. I got sober in May of 2016, and not a day goes by that I don’t feel profound gratitude for [that].
“Nine years ago, I was struggling – as so many do – with serious addiction. It was only by the grace of God that I found recovery. I knew my life depended on it.”
She is also devoting energy to the first and most important relationship of her life: the one she has with music.
She has released a new single called ‘The One Who Can’, and tells Stellar its message is one she wants to “share with every person that needs to be reminded they’re not alone, no matter how difficult whatever they’re facing is.
“I’m blessed to get to alchemise pain into art, and share it with others to help them get through tough times. Music is powerful like that.”
The song marks the first release from an album she’s working on in Nashville, and which is slated for release in early 2025. Its final track listing, she says, will “make sense of everything I’ve been through”. There are also plans for an Australian tour next year.
“I’m extremely excited to be heading back,” she says. “I’m sure it will be delightful and quite emotional, as I’ve been through so much. It’s those full-circle moments, where we return to where we came from, that we truly get to appreciate how far we’ve come.
“Australia will forever be a huge part of my heart and soul; it’s where I spent the first 19 years of my life. It is such a fantastic country. I try to never take that for granted.”
And she continues to rely on her faith. As she says, “Pain is often the touchstone of spiritual growth. Sometimes I ask Jesus why it couldn’t be joy or fun instead, but what I do know is: we are far stronger than we can even imagine.
“We can never retrospectively know what we do now. But when we know better, we do better. I’m still learning to give myself that grace. I often wish I could have protected my younger self more, but that’s like wishing I was born with the wisdom I’m still seeking and learning now.
“God knew the whole time [that] I was going to survive this. There were definitely moments that I didn’t. Still, I kept on doing the next right thing.
“Now, with a bit of distance, I can say there is no person that has the power to actually destroy you. We can really get through anything. If you can survive what you have, and come out of it and still be grateful, and have a heart full of joy … that’s a powerful thing.
“That’s why I believe I had to go through some of these hard things in my life, so that I can be living proof of God’s grace, knowing there’s nothing you can’t survive with the right mindset.”
Read the full interview with Firerose inside Stellar this coming Sunday via The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD), and Sunday Mail (SA). For more from Stellar and the podcast Something To Talk About, click here.
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