Last year, a video of Kroll’s girlfriend, Madison LeCroy, seemingly catching him cheating went viral. Now, it’s a story on the show.
Austen Kroll would’ve liked to have brought his relationship to TV under better circumstances.
The 31-year-old’s girlfriend of nearly a year, Madison LeCroy, made her debut on Wednesday’s Southern Charm season six premiere thanks to a secretly recorded video of the couple that, to an extent, went viral last year. In the nearly two-minute clip, Madison and Austen are seen having an expletive-filled argument after Madison, seemingly, walked in on Austen with two other women. At one point, Madison starts talking to the women, neither of whom appear on screen, asking one if she "f**ked him last night." The woman answers no, to which Madison fires back, "So then why are your panties lying by the bed?!"
"Because they slept in my f**king bedroom," Austen jumps in, going on to tell Madison that he’s "so f**king embarrassed for" her.
"So, I guess what I can say is that was very early on [in our relationship]," Austen tells ET. "[That was] Madison and I trying to figure out what we were. We both hadn’t done the, you know, 'you’re my girlfriend, and you’re my boyfriend' talk, right?"
"We definitely were both trying to push it to see how much the other person cared," he continues. "'I’m going to go out tonight and I’m not going to talk to her. See if that bothers her,' or vice versa. And so, we had this talk, right? Because she was talking about the fact that her ex, like, wouldn’t leave her alone. You tell me to leave you alone and I will never -- I’m gone. And, we kind of had one of those moments. I was like, fine, fine."
"So, I busied myself and it didn’t turn out so well," he says. "Because she showed up the next day and was like, 'Wait! I want to talk things over.'"
Check out the full clip here:
Austen says his initial reaction to the whole thing was a simple, "s**t," but he adds he, to this day, doesn’t really know what happened between him and the two women Madison discovered in Austen’s apartment at "seven f**king thirty in the morning."
"I was out of my mind," Austen admits. "I had no clue."
Thankfully, Austen says, he and Madison were able to move beyond the moment and are still together today. Still, he questioned if their relationship would withstand its first season on reality TV.
"I knew that coming into this season, that it wasn’t going to be an easy ride," he shares. "It wasn’t going to be easy going. So, I kind of just prepared the both of us like, 'Hey, look…' -- because we can control, I guess, what we talk about, but I can’t control what [our co-stars are] saying behind our back to whoever out there."
"It’s not going to be like, 'Oh! Austen and Madison are wonderful,' you know?” Austen continues. "And, 'They’re just so cute together, I love them.' I was like, we’re gonna be getting trashed for a little bit, so that’s something that, if you want to be with somebody, then you just got to work through it as best you can. And it works out sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t."
For now, Austen isn’t putting any extra pressure on his relationship with Madison, steering clear of saying she’s “the one.” However, he did offer up that this relationship feels different from any other he’s been in before.
"I take these cases day by day, these ‘cases’ being my relationship," he says. "We’ll just see … She’s in a unique situation that I have never been in before with any other girl I have ever dated. So like, I kind of follow her lead a lot. You know, she’s got a lot going on.” (Madison is a single mom.)
ET spoke with Austen and his Southern Charm co-stars, Craig Conover and Shep Rose, at the King Charles Inn in Charleston, South Carolina, where they all owned up to the fact that season six will be a tough one for the guys in the group.
"You'll find we sort of let it fly this season," Shep teases. "I felt like some of the girls were very guarded and so, if that makes us the villain, then fine. But we don't hold back."
"We put it all out there, especially the three of us," Craig adds. "We're completely transparent. What you see is what our lives were to the fullest."
"Transparency is the best way to go about doing this," Austen says. "Ups and downs, it's not just like a happy-go-lucky time."
Southern Charm airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Bravo.
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