Over the years, the Teen Mom franchise has shown us just about every kind of dysfunctional relationship imaginable.
But it’s possible that no set of Teen Mom exes despises one another as intensely as Ryan Edwards and Maci Bookout.
There are couples in the annals of the show’s history (looking at you, Jenelle Evans and David Eason), but worse exes?
Not likely. And we haven’t even gotten to this week’s news.
The parents of 12-year-old Bentley have gone through many ups and downs over the years, but the downs are getting more frequent, and it seems they’re now at their lowest point to date.
In fact, these days, Ryan’s not even allowed to see Bentley.
Believe it or not, the decision to strip Edwards of visitation rights clearly pains Maci almost as much as it does Ryan. She’s never been out to stick it to him just for the sake of being vindictive.
Bookout obviously felt that she was left with no options.
She’s encouraged Bentley’s dad to work his way back into the boy’s life offering a deal in which Ryan could go to therapy with his son and thereby regain visitation rights.
But it seems that Ryan has no interest in that deal.
This all comes on the heels of several years in which Ryan’s drug addiction and problems with the law put his family – and his son in particular – through a living hell.
Ryan (with current wife Mackenzie Standifer, above) has never been a fan favorite, but he’s had plenty of shots at redemption that have gone by the wayside.
Teen Mom fans who might have been inclined to give Edwards the benefit of the doubt, or at least pile on him less aggressively, shortly after he got clean are now coming around to this realization:
His addiction was just one of many problems.
When it rains, it pours, as they say, and boy is it pouring now. Teen Mom Nation has started digging into his past to find new reasons to dislike the 33-year-old father of three.
Not surprisingly, they didn’t have to dig very far.
In fact, one of the grossest facts of Ryan’s sordid life has been hiding in plain sight all this time:
As we all know by now, given the name of the show she starred on, a young Maci Bookout became pregnant with Bentley when she was just 16 years old.
What a lot of people don’t know is that Ryan – the man who impregnated her – was 20 at the time of conception.
This should have been obvious, as Ryan is four years older than Maci, but it’s the sort of thing that many Teen Mom fans simply didn’t think about … until now, that is.
The age difference was never addressed on the show, but fans are now taking to Reddit to discuss the very strange – and possibly criminal situation.
Viewers have been quick to address the fact that MTV would probably not shine a flattering spotlight on such a relationship in 2021.
"Thanks for giving me another reason to find Ryan gross," one redditor wrote.
"I hate this so much. I’m from the same area as them, and it’s sadly ‘normalized’ for older boys to date younger girls like they did, especially in the early 2000s," another added.
"I had no idea? This makes me think even worse about this jerk off," a third chimed in.
Even though doing so probably landed us on a government watchlist, we looked it up, and it turns out the age of consent in Tennessee is a nauseating 13.
What in the actual f–k, Tennessee?
Anyway, that means that what Ryan did wasn’t illegal, but it was still very, very disturbing.
We don’t care what the law says – a 20-year-old hooking up with a 16-year-old is 4 million kinds of wrong, and if, for some reason, you needed another reason to hate Ryan, you definitely have one now.
Folks, he’s just nasty.