Years after cheating on her partner on national TV, Tully Smyth is ready to talk about it.

In 2013, Tully Smyth was a contestant on Channel Nine’s Big Brother and on the receiving end of the nation’s fury.

Coming into the show in a relationship, Tully became intimate with fellow contestant Drew (whose real name was Anthony, because let’s make this more confusing, shall we?), therefore cheating on her then-longterm girlfriend Tahlia Farrant.

She was immediately labelled as the ‘bad girl’, and soon evicted from the house a whole six weeks before Drew. She was forced to deal with the public backlash alone.

Now, nearly five years later, she’s ready to talk about it.

“I came home to an empty house and I had nothing,” she told the 2013 winner of her season, Tim Dormer, on Popsugar’s podcast – Popcast.

“My partner had left me, taken most of the furniture, taken our dog,” she said.

The 30-year-old model and social media influencer admits that she should have broken up with her girlfriend before entering the Big Brother house and that they had been having issues in the lead up to filming.

“Something that I have never really spoken about publicly, just purely out of – funnily enough, respect for my ex is that we weren’t in a good place prior to the show,” she said to Tim.

Instead, Tully revealed that her and Tahlia “weren’t in a good place prior to the show,” and had broken up briefly a month earlier.

“I probably should have had the balls to end it before I went in… I just didn’t,” she said.

Although her relationship with Drew ended briefly after the show wrapped, Tully says she’s still close with her ex-girlfriend, and posted a touching birthday message to Tahlia on Thursday.

Looking back at her time in the house, Tully now suspects that perhaps the producers tried to nudge both her and Drew into a relationship on purpose.

“In hindsight it felt like maybe they had handpicked somebody for me. He just ticked so many boxes. Not even just aesthetically,” she said.

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“It really wasn’t until… pretty late in the game that I even thought about the fact that it could have been a set-up.”

Regardless, the drama was a ratings-booster for the show, with Tully’s eviction episode attracting more viewers than that year’s notoriously popular AFL Brownlow Medal.

With the scandal well and truly behind her, Tully is now using her experience for good; helping others who are the victims of a public backlash.

She publicly contacted The Bachelorette’s Sam Frost and says that in these situations she feels a “responsibility to reach out.”

“I know what it’s like first-hand to go through that,” explained Tully.

“My experience was rocky so when I see someone going through that — especially if they’ve been portrayed as a villain, or they’ve had a rough time.

“If I can save someone from feeling the way I felt, which was so isolated and so alone and so confused and lost, then I would do that any day of the week.”