Brooks Nader Ex-Husband was previously married to Billy Haire. The couple reportedly began dating several years before getting married in 2019 after meeting through mutual connections in New York. Billy Haire is known for working in the advertising and media industry, while Brooks Nader gained fame as a model, especially after winning the Sports Illustrated Swim Search competition, which helped launch her career in fashion and entertainment.
Their relationship stayed relatively private compared to many celebrity couples, although they occasionally appeared together at public events and on social media. In 2024, reports began circulating that Brooks Nader and Billy Haire had separated and were moving toward divorce after several years of marriage. Neither publicly shared extensive details about the breakup, but the news attracted media attention because of Brooks Nader’s growing popularity in modeling, television appearances, and celebrity culture.
Bio Table
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Billy Haire |
| Full Name Variation | William “Billy” Haire |
| Age at First Meeting Brooks | Approximately 30 (2015) |
| Age Gap with Brooks | 11–12 years (sources vary slightly) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education 1 | Bucknell University BS in Economics and History (2009) |
| Athletic Background | Lacrosse player at Bucknell University |
| Education 2 | NYU Stern School of Business MBA (2019) |
| Career Field | Media, advertising, digital sales |
| Current Role | Senior Vice President, Digital Sales and Partnerships Minute Media |
| Minute Media Description | Global technology and content company specializing in sports and culture |
| Career Background | Progressed from entry-level sales through senior leadership positions |
| How He Met Brooks | Outside Mr. Purple bar, NYC, 2015 Brooks’ fake ID was denied; Billy declined to enter |
| First Date | Sushi restaurant; Brooks got ill in the bathroom; Billy thought she wasn’t interested |
| Relationship Start | 2015 |
| Engagement | 2018 |
| Wedding Date | December 14, 2019 |
| Wedding Location | New Orleans, Louisiana |
| Wedding Size | 330 guests |
| Brooks’ Dress | Oscar de la Renta gown |
| Wedding Style | Extravagant ceremony described as elegant and celebratory |
| Marriage Duration | Approximately 4.5 years |
| Separation | Early 2024 (living apart months before announcement) |
| Divorce Announced | May 2024 |
| Divorce Finalized | 2025 |
| Children | None |
| Post-Divorce Relationship | Naomie Olindo Southern Charm (Bravo) alum |
| Instagram Official | June 2025 |
| Engaged to Naomie | December 2025 |
| Brooks’ Post-Divorce Life | Dancing With the Stars Season 33 (2024); Love Thy Nader (Hulu); dated Gleb Savchenko, Tom Brady, Prince Constantine-Alexios |
| Brooks on Billy (Viall Files, 2025) | “It was a really, really hard decision to get a divorce just because you don’t love somebody. That’s why I did it.” |
| Brooks on dating for rent | Told PEOPLE her father said “find a boyfriend” when she moved to NYC with no support she joked she did “for just the rent purposes” |
| @wchaire5 (limited public presence) | |
| Public Profile | Deliberately private professional LinkedIn presence; minimal celebrity coverage |
| Estimated Net Worth | Not publicly confirmed; senior executive salary at global media company |
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Bucknell, a Lacrosse Stick, and the Economics Degree That Built a Real Career
Did you know Billy Haire played lacrosse at Bucknell University? The sport matters because it tells you something specific about the person. Lacrosse at the collegiate level requires physical discipline, strategic thinking, spatial intelligence, and the ability to function within a team system while maintaining individual performance accountability. These are not incidental skills. They are exactly the qualities that translate into high-level sales careers in competitive media environments.
He graduated from Bucknell in 2009 with a Bachelor of Science in Economics and History. The dual focus is itself revealing. Economics provides the quantitative and strategic framework for understanding markets. History provides the contextual intelligence for understanding how systems evolve and why institutions behave the way they do. Together, they create the kind of mind that performs well in the sophisticated sales and partnership environments of modern digital media.
He moved into the advertising and media world after graduation and began building a career that would eventually land him at the Senior Vice President level in one of the more significant global sports media companies operating today. Minute Media is not a household name in the way that ESPN or Sports Illustrated is but it is a serious, globally operating technology and content platform focused on sports and culture, with significant industry presence and a client base that requires exactly the kind of senior sales leadership Billy has been building toward across his career.
A decade after finishing his undergraduate degree, he returned to higher education enrolling at the NYU Stern School of Business and completing his MBA in 2019. The timing of that credential is notable: he finished his MBA the same year he married Brooks Nader. Two major personal and professional milestones in the same calendar year, which suggests someone whose life was, at that point, moving rapidly in multiple directions simultaneously.
Mr. Purple, a Rejected Fake ID, and the Most Unusual Origin Story in Modelworld
Did you know Billy Haire did not technically meet Brooks Nader inside a bar? He met her because she could not get into one.The year was 2015. The location was Mr. Purple, a rooftop bar in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan. Brooks Nader nineteen years old, newly arrived in New York City from Louisiana, running on ambition and very little financial support attempted to enter using a fake ID. The bouncer was not impressed. The ID was rejected. Brooks was left outside.
Billy Haire, approximately thirty years old and entirely legitimate in terms of identification, was standing nearby and witnessed the whole sequence. Rather than walking in without her which would have been the straightforward thing to do he chose to stay outside. They started talking.That decision to not go into a bar, which is one of the smallest possible gestures a person can make is the origin point of a relationship that lasted nearly a decade.
Did you know their first official date nearly ended before it started? They went to a sushi restaurant. Brooks got ill during the meal and had to excuse herself to the bathroom. Billy, sitting alone at the table with his interpretation of events, assumed she was not interested and had found a polite way to escape the evening. She was actually ill. She came back. He stayed. The date continued. And the relationship that began outside a bar with a rejected fake ID survived a first date that most people would have abandoned after the bathroom incident.
How a Nineteen-Year-Old from Louisiana Found Her First Relationship in New York
Here is the part of this story that Brooks Nader herself eventually made public with the particular candor of someone who had spent several years processing it before deciding to discuss it openly.When Brooks moved to New York at nineteen, she did so without financial support from her parents. Her father’s instruction, which she later described to PEOPLE with obvious affection and dark humor, was essentially: figure out your own rent. He suggested, more specifically, that she find a boyfriend. She did. Billy Haire. And she acknowledged, with considerable self-awareness in a 2025 interview, that the initial practical dimension of that arrangement was real.
She joked about it. She was also, beneath the joke, describing something that is recognizable to anyone who has been young and broke in New York the way that financial precarity and romantic entanglement can become genuinely difficult to separate when you are nineteen and learning everything for the first time.
She also noted, in the same PEOPLE interview, that Billy was her first relationship. Her first date. Her first serious partner. She had gone from that starting point straight into a five-year marriage without the kind of relationship experience that most people accumulate gradually through their twenties. When the divorce came at twenty-seven, she said it left her feeling what she described as “childlike” because she had essentially never been single as an adult and had no reference points for what navigating romantic life independently was supposed to look like.
That observation honest, specific, and clearly processed rather than performed changed how the public understood what the marriage to Billy Haire had actually been. Not a failed relationship between equals who grew apart. A first relationship that lasted far longer than most first relationships do, between two people who were at genuinely different life stages when they met, and that ended when the person who had entered it youngest and least equipped finally understood what she needed.
December 2019 The New Orleans Wedding That Nobody Has Forgotten
On December 14, 2019, Billy Haire and Brooks Nader got married in New Orleans. The city was a natural choice Brooks grew up in Louisiana, and New Orleans carries the kind of cultural weight that makes it one of the more genuinely distinctive wedding venues available to anyone who wants the ceremony to mean something about where they came from.
Three hundred and thirty guests attended. The scale alone tells you something about the social world this couple was operating inside 330 people is not a small gathering of close friends. It is a significant public celebration that requires real organizational effort and real social infrastructure to populate.
Brooks wore an Oscar de la Renta gown. The designer choice reflects both her position in the fashion world she had won Sports Illustrated’s Swim Search open casting call the same year and was building significant modeling momentum and the specific aesthetic register the couple was going for. Oscar de la Renta is not a casual dress. It is a statement about what kind of wedding this was.
By every external measure, it was exactly the wedding it appeared to be. Two people, genuinely connected, surrounded by a community of three hundred thirty people, celebrating something they had built over four years.Less than five years later, they were living apart and preparing to announce a divorce.
The Divorce Amicable, Quiet, and Handled With Unusual Dignity
In May 2024, Brooks Nader’s representative confirmed to PEOPLE that she and Billy Haire had separated. The statement that accompanied the confirmation was brief and notably even-handed. The split was described as amicable. An insider close to both of them told PEOPLE that Brooks was a busy person at the height of her career, that all relationships were hard, and that both of them were truly remarkable people who had simply decided they were better apart.There was no villain constructed. No competing narratives issued. No statement designed to position one party more favorably than the other.
Did you know they had already been living apart for months before the announcement was made public? That private separation conducted without leaks, without sources feeding information to tabloids, without any of the drama that usually surrounds the dissolution of a high-profile relationship reflects well on both of them. They managed the end of something that was genuinely difficult with considerable composure.
Brooks later elaborated, on the Viall Files podcast in August 2025, that the decision to divorce had been profoundly hard. Not because of conflict, but because leaving someone who had done nothing wrong someone she simply no longer loved in the way a marriage required was its own particular kind of grief. She said it directly: the reason she did it was that she did not love him. That honesty, offered without additional explanation or apology, was its own form of respect for both of them.
The divorce was legally finalized in 2025. Shortly afterward, Brooks repurposed her engagement ring into a pinky ring — one of those specific, physical gestures of transformation that says something meaningful about how a person chooses to carry their past.
Brooks also revealed during an episode of Love Thy Nader her Hulu reality series with her three sisters that her parents, Holland Nader and Breaux Nader, still keep in touch with Billy. Her father officiated her sister’s wedding while maintaining a relationship with his former son-in-law. That detail, more than almost any other available, characterizes the specific tone of this particular ending.
Naomie Olindo, Southern Charm, and Billy’s Next Chapter
Billy Haire did not stay single for long at least not by the time the public found out about it. In June 2025, he made his relationship with Naomie Olindo Instagram official. Naomie is a well-known figure in the Bravo universe she appeared on Southern Charm, the long-running Charleston-set reality series, and had her own complicated romantic history on that program that viewers had followed across multiple seasons.
Did you know Craig Conover Naomie’s ex from Southern Charm spoke about the relationship publicly? He told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live that mutual friends who had known both Billy and Brooks spoke highly of him. The endorsement from an ex-partner’s former partner is one of the more unusual compliments available in the celebrity relationship ecosystem.
The relationship moved quickly. By December 2025 just six months after going Instagram official Billy and Naomie announced their engagement. The move from public relationship confirmation to engaged in half a year suggests both people were clear about what they wanted.
Social Media and Public Image The Executive Who Never Wanted This Kind of Attention
Billy Haire maintains an Instagram account under @wchaire5, but his presence there is limited and deliberately private. He is not a person who sought public attention. He is a media executive who happened to have a relationship with someone who became, in the years after their marriage, significantly more famous than she was when they met.
His public image is assembled almost entirely from coverage of his relationship with Brooks — the wedding photographs, the charity event appearances, the occasional joint social media content from their marriage years. Post-divorce, his visibility increased briefly through the Naomie Olindo relationship, which brought him into the Southern Charm adjacent media ecosystem in ways his advertising career never had.
He navigated all of it with the composure of someone who was never particularly interested in being a public figure and is not changing that position simply because circumstances have made him temporarily searchable.
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FAQs
Q1: Who is Billy Haire?
Billy Haire is an American media executive who serves as Senior Vice President of Digital Sales and Partnerships at Minute Media, a global technology and content company focused on sports and culture. He is known publicly as the former husband of Sports Illustrated model Brooks Nader, to whom he was married from 2019 to 2024/2025.
Q2: How did Billy Haire and Brooks Nader meet?
They met outside Mr. Purple, a rooftop bar in New York City’s Lower East Side, in 2015. Brooks, then nineteen, had her fake ID rejected at the door. Billy, standing nearby, chose not to enter the bar and struck up a conversation with her instead. Their first official date at a sushi restaurant nearly ended early when Brooks became ill, but the relationship continued.
Q3: What is Billy Haire’s educational background?
He earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics and History from Bucknell University in 2009, where he also played lacrosse. A decade later, in 2019, he completed an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.
Q4: When did Billy Haire and Brooks Nader get married?
They married on December 14, 2019, in New Orleans, Louisiana. The wedding had 330 guests. Brooks wore an Oscar de la Renta gown for the ceremony.
Q5: When was the divorce announced?
Brooks Nader’s representative confirmed the separation in May 2024. The couple had been living apart for several months before the public announcement. The divorce was legally finalized in 2025.
Final Words
Brooks Nader and her ex-husband Billy Haire shared a relationship that lasted nearly a decade, beginning in New York and eventually leading to a high-profile wedding in New Orleans in 2019. While Brooks built a successful career in modeling and entertainment after winning the Sports Illustrated Swim Search competition, Billy continued growing his professional career in media and digital advertising. Despite living in different public worlds, they maintained a relatively private marriage and avoided major public controversy throughout their relationship.
Their separation in 2024 and finalized divorce in 2025 marked the end of an important chapter in both of their lives. Even after the breakup, reports suggested the split remained respectful and amicable, with both continuing to move forward professionally and personally. Brooks Nader remained active in television, fashion, and celebrity culture, while Billy Haire stayed focused on his executive career and private lifestyle. Their story continues to attract public interest because it combines celebrity fame, personal growth, and the challenges of maintaining long-term relationships in the public eye.