The Moment
Donna Kelce walked into The Traitors castle with one clear wish: no exes allowed.
In a Season 4 cast round-up for the Peacock reality competition, the 73-year-old NFL super-mom was asked who she wouldn’t want to run into in the Scottish castle. Her answer? “Maybe some of my sons’ adversaries.”
She elaborated that could mean “other teams,” “coaches,” or “past girlfriends.” Notice how that last part just hangs in the air like a chandelier about to fall? She didn’t drop any names, but she absolutely tossed the tiniest bit of shade in their general direction.
Donna Kelce takes a dig at sons Travis and Jason’s exes on ‘The Traitors’ https://t.co/Gonar01Q9h pic.twitter.com/9laBfZIgkD
— Page Six (@PageSix) January 9, 2026
Donna also shared a much friendlier wish list of fellow contestants she would love to see: Stevie Nicks, Martha Stewart, or Shaquille O’Neal. So yes, the woman who raised Travis and Jason Kelce is now out here casually manifesting a Stevie-Martha-Shaq crossover episode in a murder-mystery game show. I respect the ambition.
For context, Travis Kelce’s dating history has already been through the pop-culture spin cycle. He briefly dated Maya Benberry after his 2016 dating show “Chasing Kelce,” then went on to a longer on-and-off relationship with influencer Kayla Nicole. More recently, he moved on with Taylor Swift after trying to get her attention at her Eras Tour stop in Kansas City in July 2023, and the pair went public that fall. The original report says they announced their engagement in August 2025.
Jason Kelce, meanwhile, has been firmly off the market for years, married to Kylie Kelce since 2018. The couple met in 2014 and now have four daughters together.
Season 4 of “The Traitors” premieres on Peacock on January 8 at 9 p.m. ET, with Donna among the new faces entering that very drafty Scottish castle.
The Take
I’m going to say what a lot of people are thinking: this is classic mom energy. Donna Kelce basically just told the world, “Love my boys, love their current partners, I do not need to relive their past situationships on national TV.”
Was it a brutal drag of Travis and Jason’s exes? No. It was more like a polite Midwestern version of blocking someone on Instagram. You won’t bad-mouth them in public, but you’d also rather not share a room, a castle, or a hidden bunker with them.
And you can’t really blame her. Travis’s exes have already had to watch their private history get reheated and served next to the Travis-and-Taylor fairytale. Maya Benberry has previously described dealing with a public breakup as “overwhelming,” and Kayla Nicole has been pulled into the discourse more times than anyone deserves. Now picture all that tension being turned into a reality-game-plot twist for ratings. Of course Mom would like to opt out.
Donna’s comment also reads like a not-so-subtle endorsement of where things stand now. By naming nobody and singling out “past girlfriends” as people she doesn’t want to play with, she’s drawing a quiet line around her sons’ current lives-especially Travis and Taylor Swift. It’s giving, “We’ve moved on, and the door is shut, but we wish you well… from a distance.”
If the Kelce family were a group chat, Donna’s answer is that message that says, “We’re not revisiting that chapter, remember?” followed by an aggressively cheerful photo of the grandkids.
It’s also smart brand management. Donna has become a celebrity in her own right-NFL mom, Super Bowl suite fixture, late-night guest. Now she’s entering a show built on paranoia, betrayal, and sleight of hand. Drawing a boundary around real family drama up front is a way to keep the show fun and fictional, not a reunion special for her sons’ love lives.
Receipts
Confirmed:
- Donna Kelce is a cast member on Season 4 of Peacock’s reality competition series “The Traitors,” which is filmed in a Scottish castle (per Peacock’s official series materials).
- In a Season 4 cast round-up video, she said she wouldn’t want to see “some of my sons’ adversaries,” clarifying that could include “other teams,” “coaches,” or “past girlfriends” (per the show’s promotional content).
- Travis Kelce starred in the 2016 dating series “Chasing Kelce” and briefly dated winner Maya Benberry afterward (per network descriptions and coverage of the show at the time).
- Jason Kelce has been married to Kylie Kelce since 2018, and they share four daughters, a fact both have discussed publicly and shared via their own social media.
Reported / Not Independently Verified Here:
- That Travis and Taylor Swift took their romance public in October 2023 and later announced their engagement in August 2025 (as stated in the original 2026 entertainment report).
- The specific wording and full context of Maya Benberry’s comments about their public breakup being “overwhelming” (summarized in later coverage rather than sourced directly here).
Sources (human-readable): Peacock press and promotional materials for “The Traitors” (Season 1 onward, 2023-2024); network and NFL bios for Travis and Jason Kelce (2016-2024); syndicated entertainment report on Donna Kelce’s Season 4 casting and comments, published January 9, 2026.
Backstory (For Casual Readers)
If you’re not already living inside the Kelce-Swift cinematic universe, here’s the quick recap. Travis Kelce is a star tight end in the NFL; his brother Jason is a retired center who spent his career with the Philadelphia Eagles. Their mom, Donna, went viral by showing up to games in split jerseys during a season where both sons made huge playoff runs and eventually faced off in the Super Bowl. When Travis began dating Taylor Swift, Donna’s every sideline reaction became a meme, and she slid neatly into the role of America’s favorite football mom.
“The Traitors” is a reality competition where celebrities and personalities live together in a remote castle. A few are secretly chosen as “Traitors” who scheme to eliminate the rest, known as the “Faithful,” while everyone tries to build a prize pot. It’s part murder mystery, part social chess match, and very much the kind of show where old grudges make great TV-hence the question about people Donna wouldn’t want to see.
What’s Next
Season 4 of “The Traitors” premieres January 8 at 9 p.m. ET on Peacock, with Donna Kelce stepping into the castle as one of the new players. Expect producers to lean hard into her NFL-mom persona and the built-in fan bases that come with the Kelce name-and, by extension, Taylor Swift.
The big question now is whether the show will poke at her “past girlfriends” comment in confessionals or challenges, or whether it stays a one-line boundary that everyone quietly respects. Also worth watching: whether any of Travis’s or Jason’s exes respond on social media once the episode airs, or if they wisely decide to stay out of the castle drama altogether.
Donna seems determined to keep her sons’ real romantic history from becoming a game mechanic, but reality TV has a way of dragging old storylines back from the dead. Either way, the Kelce family just extended their media universe into yet another genre-this time, with cloaks, candles, and secret banishments.
Your turn: Do you read Donna’s “past girlfriends” comment as harmless mom humor, or does it cross the line into unnecessary shade at women who’ve already had enough public scrutiny?
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