Though they date all the way back to 2014, rumors that Ellie Goulding cheated on Ed Sheeran with Niall Horan have stuck around to this day. But in a recent interview, the “Love Me Like You Do” singer denied ever even being in a relationship with Sheeran and opened up about the real-life effects the drama had on her at the time.
“It’s fascinating how many people are interested in that,” she told Daily Mail Sunday (Feb. 19). “It happened nine years ago. You know, completely honestly, it caused me a lot of trauma, actually.”
“I envy the fact that my friends just spent their 20s having flings and one-night stands and what every 20-something goes through in private,” Goulding continued. “But every single thing I did was written about. I was made to feel like a terrible person and I really struggled with that because I know I’m not.”
If you need a crash course on what exactly the public assumed went down between the three artists, just take a listen to Sheeran’s “Don’t” — a scathing single off X about being cheated on by a lover who makes “money the same way,” which fans concluded was about Goulding, as both she and the “Bad Habits” singer are career musicians. Another notable lyric: “It’s not like we were both on tour/ We were staying on the same f–king hotel floor/ And I wasn’t looking for a promise or commitment/ But it was never just fun, and I thought you were different.”
Goulding, however, denies ever even being a couple with Sheeran. “I did go on a few dates with Niall, but I was never in a relationship with Ed,” she said in a 2015 interview with Elle UK. “I have absolutely no idea where that came from and why it was turned into such a big thing.”
The revelations comes a couple months after Goulding responded to a comment freshly accusing her of cheating nearly 10 years ago on one of her TikToks, to which she replied, “False!!!!”
“I can laugh about [the rumor] now but it changed things for me,” she said of the TikTok comment. “I became kind of reclusive. I didn’t want to perform. That’s why I wrote that comment because every day I get comments about this stupid teenage situation. It was nothing and it was private – and it caused me such a huge amount of grief and I resent it.”
All’s well that ends well, though. Goulding went on to marry Caspar Jopling in 2019 and welcomed a son in 2021, meanwhile Sheeran shares two daughters with wife Cherry Seaborn. “It is in the past and we’re friends,” Goulding said of her relationship with Sheeran now. “We’re adults.”
