Heisman winner Travis Hunter deactivates Instagram as online trolls continue to pile on fiancée
Travis Hunter has deactivated his Instagram account a few days after he spoke out regarding the backlash his fiancée, Leanna Lenee, received recently.
The University of Colorado Boulder cornerback has disclosed the reason for taking his account down but in the period since Hunter received the Heisman Trophy on December 14, Lenee has experienced a deluge of negative feedback based on her actions at the ceremony.
In photos and videos posted from the event, Lenee seemingly appeared to tell Hunter: “Am I supposed to just sit here all day?” When Hunter was also announced as the winner Lenee also did not stand up as Deion Sanders, the Buffaloes head coach, alerted her to do so.
Across social media, some users claimed that Hunter and Lenee were having a “heated discussion” and made comments about Lenee’s supposed lack of support for Hunter. Others encouraged the college football player to reevaluate their relationship if she wasn’t going to be actively celebrating his success.
Hunter then addressed the comments during a Twitch stream on December 15, revealing that Lenee read the comments and ended up crying herself to sleep.
“She’s still sleeping,” Hunter said on Twitch. “You know, when you’re hurt but you just cry yourself to sleep? She drunk an OD amount tonight for no reason.”
“It’s hard on me because I can’t even help her,” he added.
The college football player continued to explain how the incident has affected him, saying: “Y’all hate on me and then y’all go and hate on my girl. Bro, I feel the same thing that she feels. We’re inseparable, bro. We’re with each other. If she’s hurting, of course I’m going to be hurting. If I’m hurting, of course she’s going to be hurting.”
He ended the stream by clarifying what the two were discussing his family at the ceremony. “Some of them wanted to go back to the hotel, some of them didn’t,” he said.
On December 16, Lenee made a since-deleted TikTok, where she gave her side of what happened.
“People are saying that I’m like, ‘What am I supposed to do? Just sit here?’” she said in response to one of the viral clips. “That’s not what I said, first of all,” she said.
The football player’s fiancée explained that the people surrounding Hunter were not fans, but were actually Adidas employees who wanted to get clips of Hunter for their social media accounts. At the time, she said she was checking in with Hunter to figure out what he wanted her to do since the ceremony was over.
“I said, ‘Do you want me to sit here? Or do you want me to go with the family? Or do you want me to come with you?’ Because again, what y’all don’t know off of a seven-second clip, is those weren’t fans, by the way, he had already finished that part,” Lenee said.
“I wasn’t annoyed with no fans, at all. I’m never annoyed with fans,” Lenee continued. “So that’s what that was.”
Hunter and Lenee revealed their engagement in February after first going public with their relationship in 2022. He even thanked her in his acceptance speech for the Heisman Trophy, which is awarded annually to the top player in college football.
