Kailyn Hasty has spoken out after her second arrest in a week, insisting she is “not a bad person” in a social media post that drew both support and backlash.
Hasty, 19, a freshman at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, was first arrested last Thursday for alleged domestic assault at an apartment complex in the same city, police said. She was booked as the primary aggressor, though officials did not release details of the alleged assault or identify the victim.
Three days later, just before midnight Monday, Hasty was arrested again. She was riding as a passenger in a car pulled over for a routine traffic stop when the officer discovered the driver had an active protective order against her, police said. That second booking was for violating the protection order. She was later released from the Rutherford County Adult Detention Center.
The back-to-back arrests cost Hasty her spot on the university cheer squad. She “was dismissed from the cheer squad following her arrest,” a university spokesperson told The Post, though she remains enrolled at MTSU.
Brooke Legens, the cheer team leader, addressed the dismissal in a statement to the college’s student newspaper, MTSU Sidelines. “Her actions are not a reflection of our values as a University or Spirit Program,” Legens said. “MTSU Spirit nor I or any of our coaches condone violence in any type and it will never be tolerated. Our athletes work hard year-round to represent our University at the highest level, and we will continue to do so.”
Hasty, who graduated from Tullahoma High School in Middle Tennessee this spring according to her social media, took to Snapchat after her second release to address the situation directly. “I’m not a bad person,” she wrote, adding that she wanted to tell her side of the story. The post, which circulated among fellow students, offered no specifics about either arrest but framed the incidents as misunderstood.
The domestic assault arrest came at an apartment complex in Murfreesboro, the same city where MTSU’s campus sits. Police have not disclosed whether the alleged victim in that case was another student, a romantic partner, or someone else entirely. The protective order that triggered the second arrest was already in place before the traffic stop, suggesting the order may have stemmed from the same underlying situation as the assault allegation.
Hasty’s case has drawn significant attention on campus and in local social media circles, where classmates have debated both the severity of the allegations and the university’s swift decision to remove her from the cheer team. Some expressed sympathy for a teenager navigating legal trouble far from home for the first time; others pointed to Legens’ statement as evidence that the program took the matter seriously.
The freshman’s social media presence previously highlighted her cheer career and her excitement about joining the MTSU squad. Tullahoma High School, her alma mater, sits about 35 miles southeast of the university in a largely rural part of Middle Tennessee.
Neither arrest has yet resulted in formal charges being announced by the Rutherford County District Attorney’s office, and no court dates have been made public.