Bella Hadid Was Dating Her Best Friend’s Brother, Nathan Lacy, the Whole Time
Bella Hadid, 30 years old, has stopped letting the rumor mill speak for her.
The supermodel posted photos on Instagram of herself with Nathan Lacy at a hockey game, the first time she has placed the Colorado project manager in her own feed after months of sightings and conflicting reports about what the two are to each other.
Trending Now!!:
In the pictures, she is wrapped in a hug while Lacy grins broadly beside her. Neither has issued a statement about the post.
The reaction came quickly. Some commenters urged Hadid to keep her private life private, and one wrote that the men she dates seem drawn to her fame. Others skipped the romance altogether and turned to her blonde hair, saying they missed the dark shade.
Nathan Lacy, 38, is from Crested Butte, a small ski town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. He works as a project manager in his family’s construction business, and the family also runs Lacy Ranch. His link to Hadid began with friendship: he is the brother of Rachael Lacy, a close friend of the model, whose children Hadid spent time with over the summer.
His own Instagram account is private and had only about 300 followers when his name first surfaced. Before anyone knew who he was, the internet simply called him the mystery cowboy.
The first glimpse came in Milan, where Hadid and Lacy were photographed leaving a restaurant during Milan Fashion Week, with Lacy trailing a step behind her and months passed with little more. In July, Rachael Lacy shared a photo of the pair in Colorado, posing playfully at a rodeo, and a source close to Hadid told reporters she was single and that she and Lacy were friends.
Another insider offered a softer version: Hadid was getting to know someone and seeking companionship rather than marriage, and onlookers should not read too much into it, because “she’s not trying to make this more than it is.” An eyewitness added to the confusion that same month by reporting that Hadid had been seen with her ex, Adan Banuelos, at Kemo Sabe in Aspen.
Over Labor Day weekend, the two were seen grocery shopping together in Crested Butte before leaving in a Lacy Ranch truck, a sighting described as their third semi-public outing.
Fans later noticed a photo of the pair on her phone’s lock screen in one of her posts, and a photo dump she shared after the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show carried a subtle hint about where things stood, though she appears to have deleted that image. A few weeks after the show, the two were seen together at a Colorado Avalanche game, and the photos she has now shared are from a hockey game.
The public step closes a chapter that played out in a very different register. Adan Banuelos, a professional horse trainer and rider, met Hadid at a horse show in Fort Worth, Texas, not long after she moved to the state in 2023 to focus on her health.
They were first linked in October 2023, when they were seen kissing in Fort Worth, and she confirmed the romance on Instagram in February 2024 by slipping a photo of the two into a carousel from her birthday party. She bought property near him, won her first rodeo check in July 2025, and cheered him on at the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas that December.
Their last known appearance together was at a Dallas event for her fragrance brand, Orebella, the same month. Sources reported the split on January 26, after roughly two years described as on-again, off-again, with the pair reportedly co-owning million-dollar horses. Banuelos, then 36, and Hadid have not publicly addressed it.
Cowboys are not a new chapter in the story so much as a recurring one, though Hadid’s earlier romances belonged to different worlds. She was linked to the singer The Weeknd, whose real name is Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, in an on-and-off romance that began in 2015, and she went public with Marc Kalman on Instagram in July 2021.
Her sister, Gigi Hadid, has been publicly linked with the actor Bradley Cooper, and the sisters are the daughters of Mohamed Hadid and Yolanda Hadid.
Isabella Khair Hadid, as she is formally known, has so far let the photographs do the talking. Her post leaves the details to speculation: how long she and Lacy have been together, whether the casual arrangement insiders described in the summer has deepened, and what her family and friends make of the new pairing.
