In a new interview with friend Natalie Manuel Lee, Woods opened up about what it was like to be the focus of public shaming in the wake of the scandal, what she learned about herself from the experience and was asked if she was “happy” it all happened because of the person it made her.
In case you forgot, Woods and Thompson attended a party together shortly after Valentine’s Day — on February 17, 2020 — where it was alleged they hooked up. Jordyn later denied flirting with Khloe’s man, proclaiming on Red Table Talk, “I’m no home wrecker.” She claimed he only kissed her on the way out of the party and apologized for putting herself in a situation where that would happen. Though Khloe initially slammed Woods on Twitter, she later issued a statement saying Tristan, and not Jordyn, was at fault.
But as the allegations came out, Woods said everyone turned on her.
“I remember just sitting in a very dark place. I had my family to talk to, I had you to talk to, but I just felt like I had no one,” Kylie Jenner’s former best friend told Lee. “You take everything you think you know for a whole decade, the people you think you know, the life you think you know, everything that you’ve grown up doing and take it all away from someone. I didn’t even know how to feel.”
Woods said it was easy for her to not engage with a lot of the backlash at the time because she “deleted everything off of my phone.” She added, “I wouldn’t respond to anyone. I responded to about two people. I pushed people away that probably shouldn’t have been pushed away but I just couldn’t trust anyone. Everything in my life changed.”
“It’s easy to make it seem like the world is against you and in that case in that moment, I did feel like everything was against me,” she continued. “The only thing I really had to lean on was my faith and my family. At some point in time, you’re going to go through something that feels like your world is falling apart.”
Jordyn said the scandal, in addition to the death of her father in 2017, were both “some of the most traumatic experiences a person can go through.”
“A lot can happen in one year, a lot. A lot can happen in one day. A lot did happen to me in one day,” she said. “Over months, and losing everything I thought I knew and gaining so much knowledge, you just can only be happy. The amount of strength I’ve gained in this year alone, nothing else could have shaped me to the person I am today.”
That prompted Lee to ask whether she was happy everything that went down happened, because of who it made her in the process.
“I’m not happy that people were hurt and people had to go through what they went through,” Woods answered. “It was a lot for everyone, my family, other families, friends and not in a million years have I had a negative intention to do anything bad to anyone that I love. I wouldn’t say that I’m happy something like that happened, but I’m happy that I was able to become who I am today.”
Part of moving on from the situation meant owning up to her part in what happened. Woods said she asked herself what she should take accountability for, which helped her heal without shame.
“Looking at the situation, ‘Okay what did I do, what role did I play in this, how was I responsible, how can I be held accountable, how can I take responsibility for what happened?'” she said she asked herself at the time. “Things happen and that’s what makes us human. But just acceptance and accountability and responsibility. I feel like people in this generation lack accountability and when you can’t accept what you’ve done or you can’t accept that, then you can’t heal from it.”
“It’s easy to beat yourself up over things that you could have done differently,” she added. “You can’t hold on to what you could have or should have done, you just have to accept what actually happened and then you can let it go. It might take you a month to let it go, it might take you a year to let it go but you have to start praying to be able to let it go.”
Woods said she also found herself asking, “God, why me?” when everything went down, wondering, “What happened that led me here?”
“When I stood still, I had a second and it was almost like this voice popped into my head and said, ‘Not why you, yes you,'” she explained. “This is your path. Life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you.”
While she’s no longer close with any of the Kardashians, Woods has moved on past the scandal — and recently went public with her new boyfriend, Karl-Anthony Towns.
