“I am always honored when somebody looks at my little country bumpkin ass and thinks, Oh, that could translate to high fashion,” says 27-year-old Hayden Anhedönia from the center booth in a Manhattan diner. The musician known primarily by her stage persona, Ethel Cain, is talking about being invited to sit front row at a Dior Homme Paris Fashion Week show. “It was very cool and I was very grateful,” she says.
Her own much-discussed style—a Southern gothic fantasy full of neutral hues and vintage finds—is evident at our interview: blue jeans, baby-blue tee, cowboy boots. She loved riffing on it for her Cosmopolitan cover shoot and clearly excels—in both her music and aesthetic—at bringing Ethel Cain’s haunting, beautiful yet flawed character to life.
Still, it’s important to understand that she is not actually Ethel, says Hayden. “Ethel Cain, the project, is a cautionary tale. She makes all the mistakes so that I can learn from her mistakes and do better.”
Her two studio albums, 2022’s Preacher’s Daughter and 2025’s Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, deal in agonizing topics like religious trauma, abuse, and violence. And although Hayden has given Ethel a fictional love affair with Willoughby Tucker, it’s the artist herself who’s currently striving for a real-life storybook romance with her first-ever boyfriend—and who is being dogged by fallout from past mistakes.
Last summer, a Redditor brought to light old social media posts of Hayden’s that contained racial slurs. The internet piled on, resurfacing more of what it labeled highly problematic social media activity from Hayden’s past. One poster accused Hayden’s boyfriend of having a history of violence. Hayden released an apology for her “inflammatory” posts but also asserted her platforms were hacked and she was the target of a transphobic “smear campaign.”
“This year has been a wake-up call about existing as a trans woman who isn’t palatable to the general public and who is very open about harsh topics,” she tells me now. As a trans woman myself, I can deeply relate. We’re often attacked when we hold up a mirror to things people don’t want to see. But, of course, Hayden acknowledges, that’s no excuse for racism.
“The things from my past were hateful. I will always take accountability for my mistakes,” she continues. “But at the same time, I want to hold other people accountable for the quickness at which they jump to absolutely destroy.”
In the meantime, she’ll continue to battle her own demons through her music, she says. “I’ve spent years trying ignorance is bliss, but even then you know something is not right. You’re like, There’s something scary in my closet, I can hear it scratching at night.”
What have you been doing today?
I woke up. I ate a croissant. I laid in bed. I usually wake up really early and then lay in bed for hours and hours and then I journal and think about everything way too much. I freak myself out.
It sounds like you’re the kind of person who looks introspectively and battles their demons.
Wow, really diving in deep here.
Yeah, I know. I did want to start calm. How was your Cosmopolitan photo shoot? Did you have a favorite look?
Yes, the weird plaid drop waist, 1920s, Paul Bunyan minidress thing.
You were at designer Jonathan Anderson’s debut show with Dior—very “fashion girl” of you. Are you really into style?
Hayden absolutely is. Ethel Cain is one character in one story, but I have a lot of stories going on. I love to play dress up and allow myself to try out other stuff. I have a personal style for me as an individual.
Speaking of you, personally, I heard you were homeschooled?
Yes, my mom homeschooled me. My dad was a trucker for a while up until I was probably in kindergarten, and then he started working in the plant that he drove for. He's always been a blue collar boy, a country boy. My mom was a deeply neurotic weird girl who was very pretty. I think my mom’s the coolest girl in the world.
Are you close with them?
I am. In my adult life, I’ve really found a relationship with them that I value more than anything. But growing up, watching them interact with each other was always funny because they’re so different yet obviously in love. I always wanted that. I was like, “Well, if I’m going to be the kooky weird girl, I want my country boy.” It’s very hard at the intersection of all the things that I am to find someone like that who genuinely will love you. I always prayed and waited for that, because I was like the weirdo trans girl from Florida who wants a blue collar trucker.
Who is not going to threaten your safety or fetishize you or hate your identity.
Who is not going to just waltz into your life easily.
So how did you handle crushes and making friends as a homeschooled kid?
I didn’t. In my small town, I would see someone attractive, but I couldn’t fathom what them talking to me would be like. I felt like I did not exist. I didn’t have my first kiss until I was 16. I told my best friend I’d never been kissed, and she was like, “Somebody should kiss you.” It was actually two of my best friends. All three of us made out. We were in the woods, drinking hot chocolate and stargazing, and they were like, “Okay, here’s how you kiss.”
Tell me about your first crush, then.
When I entered the real world at 18 or 19, other people were dating and making friends and I had no idea how. My first crush was on this guy that I met going to community college. Every time I would see him at school, I would get so happy. I loved just being around him. He was so nice to me. I would sit in his lap and he would carry me around. I was in theater, so we were all very touchy and comfortable with each other like that.
I remember thinking, This is how I would like to be treated by someone—someone who just is comfortable and doesn’t feel like I’m a freak. He did not like me back like that at all and I knew that it would never be like that, but I appreciated how kind he was to me and how genuine of a friend he was.
How did you go from having your first crush to starting to date?
I believed for a very long time that I was very undesirable. I remember being in rooms with friends thinking, I’m too ugly to sit here. I’m too weird and gross and unpalatable to the people around me. I have a very hard time believing when people tell me that they find me attractive. I’ve always been very deeply insecure about myself in all aspects. I’m surrounded by people who love me, and sometimes it makes me feel guilty for not trusting them when they say that that’s how they feel.
I’m sorry to hear that.
It is what it is. I think that’s one of the reasons that I dove into my work and spent all my time working. I thought, Well, if no one’s going to love me and if I’m disgusting and unlovable, I’m just going to tell stories and be an artist. Nobody has to love me—they can love the art, but they don’t have to love me.
Do you still want to model your relationship after your parents’?
I do. I’ve always asked God for a love like my parents, for better or for worse, for everything that that means. I’ve always prayed for that.
How much of your dating experience is reflected in the music that you have out right now?
A lot of the music itself is steered more by my fear of dating than actual dating. My current boyfriend is the only man I’ve ever actually been with. We met at my favorite truck stop. I used to hang out there in high school. He’s from Mississippi and he doesn’t really come to Florida that often so it was very weird that he was there.
Did he know who you were, or was he just interested in you as a stranger?
He didn’t know it was me. He’d heard of my music before, which threw me off at first. I was covered from head to toe because it was the middle of December. But he was like, “Yeah, I just thought you were pretty, I wanted to come up and say hi.” I knew immediately that I liked him—he’s very physically my type.
What type is that?
Bald guys. I love bald, weirdo, masculine, white trashy dudes. That’s just like everybody in my hometown, that’s what I’m used to. But he’s not just your typical country boy. I could tell he was weird in the same way I was weird. His dad was a preacher; he’s a trucker. We both have been through a lot and are coming out of a very strange tumultuous time in our lives. I don’t know what it was, but I felt a way about him I’d never felt about anybody. I thought, Oh, fuck, this is it.
How were you able to write Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You when you’re just going through your first real-life love experience right now?
With Willoughby Tucker, I said, “If I’m not going to be in love right now, I’m going to run through my ideal relationship and the way that I want to experience love and just explore what this would look like.” So I injected all of my wants, all my wishes, all my fears, all of my anxieties into this story and let it play out on this fictional stage. Now that I’m in a relationship at the same time Willoughby’s coming out, I’m revisiting all of these songs and listening to the lyrics and watching my old anxieties and desires play out in an actual relationship.
How is it going?
We had a really easy six months of long distance while he was on the road and I was finishing the record, and it was very sweet. I would see him once or twice a month. We always had a really good time, but I was still being very guarded.
And then I just woke up one morning and I was like, “Fuck, I love you” and all my fears—that weren’t true—came out of the floodgates. “Nettles” came out at the exact same time, and “Nettles” is a song I wrote four years ago about all of my anxieties. And it was so funny, all of those emotions playing out at the same time that “Nettles” was surrounding me.
You’re really prophesying your own destiny.
I look back at that project and think, Ethel let it get the best of her, she made these mistakes, she pushed him away, and she was not respectful or sensitive to his own issues and she wound up destroying it. So I, at all costs, can’t do that to my own relationship. It’s the blueprint of what not to do.
Falling in love has given me a new outlook on life, because I’m like, “I want to be alive because I want as much time with you as possible.” I have a journal that I bought, a separate journal just to specifically write about my boyfriend. And in the very first page, I just wrote, “I hope the world doesn’t end soon. I would like more time with my boyfriend.”
You’re at the intersection of transness and celebrity. Do you ever worry for your safety when it comes to making new connections?
I’m constantly worried, especially in this political climate. Even just being outspoken on my identity in the trans community and other sociopolitical issues is frightening. I’ve never been in a situation physically where I genuinely feared for my life, which I’m very grateful for. But I have been through things, my family has been through things that were frightening and made me worry, How far are people that don’t like me willing to take this? So it is frightening, but I would say it’s frightening to be a minority in any way, especially in America. I think that the greatest form of activism you can do as a minority is to continue living your life.
I do want to talk about the drama online recently. Did you feel like you were being held accountable or was it a transphobic attack, or both?1
It was so layered. The things from my past were hateful, and I was responsible for taking accountability no matter how they came to light. In my statement, I said, “I’m deeply ashamed and deeply regret that that was ever a part of my history.” But it was strange addressing it because I have intimate knowledge of this campaign against me. While some of those screenshots were mine to bear the brunt of responsibility for, the people who leaked them were not leaking them with any kind of sense of justice in mind. They were leaked to hurt me.
1. Earlier this year, Hayden acknowledged that in 2017 and 2018 she used racist slurs, mocked Latinx people, and made jokes about rape and fat people in posts online. In a July statement about the controversy, Hayden apologized for the posts and said they were intended to be as “inflammatory and controversial as possible.”
My family was doxed a year or so ago. Private addresses, phone numbers, and names were leaked. My deadname and high school photos were hacked from my Google Drive. It has spread probably the most serious allegations you could put on someone. It’s just absolutely disgusting defamation of character with the intent of painting me to be some trans pervert.2 I try to stay above it. I know who I’ve been at every step, and I only feel shame over the parts I should—everything else is what it is.
2. In response to posts accusing her of sexual abuse of an animal, glorifying incest, and drawing child pornography, she wrote, “No, I am not a violent misogynist fetishizing the ‘female experience.’ No, I am not the creator of child pornography nor am I a pedophile, a zoophile, or a porn-addicted incest fetishist. I urge you to recognize the patterns of a transphobic/otherwise targeted smear campaign, especially in this political day and age.”
It does make me worried to know that people can hate you that bad, and I wonder where it ends. This smear campaign has been attempted for years but never gained traction. But now that there are more eyes on me, it did gain traction and there are people that are willing to believe slander of that nature.
I admitted to saying racist remarks. I cannot think of something that didn’t come out of my mouth at that time, which is so embarrassing. It’s just a dark part of my life that I look back on. The fact that I would’ve said anything like that to impress my friends is probably the most embarrassing thing that I can imagine.
In your statement, you said that the catalyst of the entire “smear campaign” was a “baseless attempt to assassinate my boyfriend’s character.”3 Do you think it’s possible that the allegations aren’t baseless?
I will try to be as vague as possible because it’s not my specific story to tell, and also my boyfriend is a very private person with a private life. The moment that I saw the Reddit about him, I brought it up and I said, “What is this?” And he immediately showed me every single thing he could. He walked me through every single thing that happened and exactly how the situation went down.
And so my comment on it being baseless accusations was made out of me having a much more in-depth knowledge of the situation—as opposed to everyone reading online from a Reddit post.
As someone who’s been in abusive relationships before—not with a romantic partner but in my life—I understand the nuance and the importance of believing victims and believing when people come forward. Because of my positioning with that, with the evidence that I was provided immediately and with full clarity and transparency, it was very easy for me to defend him. And that’s why I said that. I love my boyfriend. I’m not a helpless, kept-in-the-dark whatever.
3. In June 2025, a Redditor alleged that she had dated Hayden’s boyfriend in 2020 and accused him of treating her violently, threatening her, and showing her revenge porn.
You have such an interesting fan base and they ride hard for you. At the same time, a lot of them are—or at least what they’d say on Reddit is—very parasocial.
I would agree.
What is that like?
It’s a lot. They defend me at times when I’m appreciative of it, and then they also defend me at times that I shouldn’t be defended. Obviously, a big discussion around the statement was that my fans were defending me at all costs, even to the detriment of me taking accountability for my own actions.
I am a complex person. I’m deeply flawed. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. And I also try to be a better person every day. But in prioritizing openness and honesty and giving all of myself to people, in thinking that it makes me a good person, I have accidentally, without realizing, created a parasocial environment with my fan base where I think they have more claim to me than they actually do.
Ultimately, are you pro- or anti-internet?
I’m anti-internet. I think that the internet is a breeding ground for all of the worst parts of human nature. I think that the internet will be the death of society and human beings as a species. You can quote me on that when we’re all dead.
What’s one site you still frequently visit?
I love Pinterest. I’m on Pinterest right now. It's like Tumblr, but I don’t have to talk to people. I have a lot of boards for weird shit. I just love to look at pictures.
Do you believe in happy endings?
If you believe that everything happens for a reason and that things go the way that they need to go, even if you don’t understand it at the time, then every ending can be happy. Maybe not now—but at some point.
(Title Image) Dress Colleen Allen, necklace Prounis. (Cover Image) Jacket and skirt Balenciaga, boxers ERL.
Styled by Brandon Tan. Hair by Kazu Katahira for Oribe Hair Care. Makeup by Grey Hoffman. Set design by Caz Slattery. Shot on location at Bonnie Brook Farm.