A year ago Hawk Tuah girl went viral – Metro catches up with Haliey Welch to find out what happened next

Metro

a day ago

As they roamed the vibrant Broadway thoroughfare in Nashville, Tennessee, it was only ever meant to be a fun night out for Haliey Welch and Chelsea Bradford. But then the best friends encountered a pair of YouTubers and, in an instant, Haliey became immortalised as ' Hawk Tuah Girl '.
Within weeks, her throwaway comment spiralled way beyond a meme; 'hawk tuah' was emblazoned on merch, became the foundations of a podcast, and even the name of a (regrettable) cryptocurrency.
Today, her infamous phrase has helped Haliey earn around $500,000 (though when asked if this is true, her response is sketchy). Not bad for a 21-year-old just looking to get drunk one summer evening.
'When I saw how big it had become, I was a nervous wreck,' she tells Metro over Zoom, in her prominent Southern drawl. 'It felt like a train had done hit me. Before all this, I always kept to myself.'
Tim Dickerson and DeArius Marlow, from popular YouTube series Tim & Dee TV, are the people who 'discovered' Haliey. The pair were college roommates turned content creators, who made relatively tame, vox-pop style videos of people on nights out.
After stopping the girls, Haliey asked the pair to 'spice up' the questions. When asked what makes her 'wifey material', she responded with the now legendary: ' You gotta hawk tuah and spit on that thang ' – the onomatopoeic cry of lubricating a penis before oral sex.
'I've said it before, but in a different context,' she laughs. 'Me and my cousins have always said it – if someone makes us mad, we'd say we were going to 'hawk tuah, spit on that bitch' as an insult.
'I guess I kind of phrased it up a little and used it in a different way. But I wasn't being serious when I said it, and I didn't think anything twice about it after I already done the interview.'
Tim and DeArius, who were no slouches when it came to content creation, knew such a response would go viral – they just didn't expect how viral.
While the original video has 4.1 million views, Haliey's moment was uploaded hundreds and hundreds of times (without the watermark, leaving the YouTubers effectively forgotten. While they haven't shown her any ill will, the pair have claimed in interviews that they should have had more credit).
For Hawk Tuah Girl, it was a particularly surreal moment. At the time, she was living with her grandmother and working a minimum wage job in a factory nearby. It was her family who spotted just how famous she was online, after seeing her video plastered all over Facebook – Haliey, at the time, did not have any social media.
'I knew I had to tell my granny before anyone else did. I sat her down and had to explain what hawk tuah was,' she recalls. 'She just giggled about it. Next thing I know, she starts showing up wearing a hawk tuah hat everywhere.'
The sudden obsessive popularity led to fast-acting merchandisers creating gear emblazoned with the phrase – and making serious cash from it. Within weeks, one brand had sold over 2,000 'Hawk Tuah' hats, earning around £50,000, according to Rolling Stone magazine.
Seeing people profiting off her popularity was like a 'smack in the face' says Haliey – and believing she was about to get fired from her factory job for missing too much work, she decided to make a go of a life of memeing.
Going viral
Hawk tuah is in no way the first meme that has beguiled the internet – those well-versed in the web's lingua franca will remember memes such as 'damn, Daniel' and 'peanut butter jelly time', but hawk tuah has remained sticky even a year after it was first uttered.
'The typical lifecycle of a viral internet moment is short – usually peaking within a few days or weeks as people react, remix, and share the content, then fading as attention shifts to the next big thing,' explains Megan Boyle, Head of PR at TAL Agency. 'Hawk tuah stuck around as it was the perfect combination of shock value, humour, and authenticity. It was easily remixable, with TikTok duets, reaction videos or captions, which kept it circulating.
'Welch herself leaned into the moment – something many viral stars don't do, but helps keep the brand alive.'
'I met up with a family friend, who recommended a lawyer to me. That led to me getting an agent and having representation,' she explains.
As a star on the rise, she recruited The Penthouse agency – whose clientele includes 'a dynamic range of artists and influencers' – and began to court the world of celebrity, as she capatalised on her fame.
Not only did she party alongside country singer Zach Bryan at his concert in Nashville, she was also invited to make the first pitch at a baseball game with the New York Mets, while appearing on a series of internet-versed podcasts.
Haliey's next move was to launch a podcast of her own, Talk Tuah, alongside best friend Chelsea Bradford, who was by her side when she first went viral. When it peaked at a respectable number five on the global Spotify podcast chats, Haliey looked set to be on a pretty unstoppable run.
But then came the introduction of the Hawk Tuah memecoin $HAWK in December.
As a spokesperson (and therefore, the de facto face), she was inextricably tied to the currency, and while it hit the $490m market cap shortly after it launched, the coin suddenly lost more than 95% of its value within hours. Some fans blamed Haliey, particularly those who invested a significant amount of money into the memecoin.
'It was the most horrific experience I've ever been through. I had no earthly idea what it was,' she admits. 'It was a gut-wrenching feeling, like you just feel sorry for everybody that supported you through it, and they lost their money putting it in because they trusted you to guide them with something good, and you didn't. You failed.'
Haliey, perhaps infamously, did a crypto Q&A on X soon after, and when she asked difficult questions by investors, she responded: 'Anyhoo, I'm going to bed' – only for her to effectively go into hiding for several months.
'It's something I had to sit there and deal with for three and four months,' she explains. 'I thought about it every day when I woke up. And of course, my social media was flooded with it too, but [cryptocurrency] is something I will not ever touch again.'
Although Haliey was cleared by authorities of any wrongdoing with the coin, it didn't stop her mental health from free-falling at this time.
'I was overwhelmed. I had moved in with my boyfriend and I just looked after my dog. I tried to keep off social media,' she says. 'There were talks of therapy, but I'm not one to talk about my problems with people, so I decided not to do that. I just tried to cope the best I could.'
Even now, after being exposed to international levels of fame, Haliey insists she continues to struggle with being recognised.
'I still find it uncomfortable. I can't even go to the grocery store, as people will say stuff to me,' Haliey admits. 'I come home and barricade myself in the house for a few days. That's really the only time I get away from it.'
Thankfully, she has support from her close-knit group of friends that have helped her adapt to her strange and uncanny new life.
'A few people I haven't talked to in years that I went to school with, tried to talk to me and be my friend, which I didn't let slide,' she adds. 'But really, the only major difference is that I don't need to worry about buying groceries.'
After some brief time away from the spotlight, Haliey relaunched her podcast this April and now hopes to have fellow Southern country girl Britney Spears on the show one day.
Her future career may be on the big screen, too – not only has she got an upcoming documentary about her instant rise to fame, she also makes a brief cameo in Glen Powell's upcoming Hulu series, 'Chad Powers'.
'I had so much fun doing it, it was just such a whirlwind. I am trying to be known as more than the Hawk Tuah Girl – but I know it's part of me now. I've accepted it, but I want to be known as Haliey Welch,' she says.
Even so, Haliey won't be heading to LA to chase the glittering lights of Hollywood, as she's still, at heart, a Tennessee girl.
'I like being out in the country, nobody around me except deer. I just love being out here – I could be out in the yard with my ducks or my dogs or my bunny. I have all sorts of creatures that can keep me entertained,' she adds with a smile.
While the future may be uncertain, there is one thing that Haliey is sure of.
'The most important thing is that I stay true to myself,' she says defiantly. 'I won't change for nobody.'
MORE: Devastated and broken, I headed to the Himalayas to heal my heartbreak
MORE: The teenage Orkney killer who got away with murder for 14 years