On January 21, Kita Rose had reached her boiling point.
That day, the radio personality, podcast host, and content creator posted a 59-second video on TikTok declaring she was unemployed and planning to explain to her 3.3M followers why in a multi-part series.
Unsurprisingly, the comments flooded in: “Kittttaaaa crashing out! Did they know who they worked with??? That’s the real question,” a user commented.
In response, Kita wrote, “I was honest about my illnesses on the application.”
Kita Rose’s Side
The application Kita referred to concerns Tonight’s Conversation, a popular video podcast featuring media personalities discussing topics in front of live audiences. Among the notables that worked with the podcast was Kita, who was considered to be the “funny one,” according to her.
Kita, who has spoken openly about her mental health challenges, says this was weaponized against her, eventually resulting in her ousting. There was a long chain of events that led to her “firing,” according to her, the podcast’s founder, Anthony ‘Ace Metaphor’ Nalls, was at the center of it all.
“He’s a narcissist and narcissists triangulate,” Kita tells ESSENCE. “They pit people against each other to start fires.”
The fires she’s referring to include conflicts she had with two other panelists, Randi Rossario and Kittie Rose.
“He would tell me things like ‘Randi hates you. She’s jealous of you.’”
She explained that the allegations came from frequent one-on-one conversations because Nalls and Kita were “friends first” above colleagues. “He will gossip with you for hours if you let him. So, when you’re doing all that, your coworkers are starting to hate you in an environment where it doesn’t have to be a competition. It can be a team, but now he’s made it a competition.”
Rossario attests to this.
Randi Rossario’s Side
“We all gossip,” Rossario tells ESSENCE. One of the podcast’s founding members since its launch in 2019, Rossario shared that the team’s environment was familial. And like most families, there’s drama.
“Nobody’s hands are 100 % clean in this situation, period,” she said. “That’s part of the foundation there. From the first recording, I saw people gossiping about me over in the corner. I wasn’t concerned about that.”
In 2024, Rossario said she stepped away from the tour due to illness. Around that time, she noticed that she was being ignored by fellow friends affiliated with the podcast but wasn’t able to understand why. That is until nearly a year later, in Jan. 2025, when she learned that she was accused of doxing Kita Rose.
“It’s alleged that there was so much tension on the second half of the {2024} tour that I was not a part of. Kittie had allegedly told Kita that I doxxed her home address.”
Kittie Rose, a popular Chiristian-based relationship coach, had joined the podcast around the time of Rossario’s exit.
“Nothing can be further from the truth,” Rossario shared. “I don’t know where she pulled that from outside of speaking to my formal virtual assistant, who was a former friend.”
ESSENCE reached out to Kittie Rose for comment, but she didn’t respond in time of publication.
Rossario shared that she has assured Kita of her non-involvement with the doxxing incident, and while the two are now on good terms, she wishes some of the public conflicts Kita made public were taken offline.
“I’m saying as someone who considered themselves the big sister in the group,” Rossario said. I wish we could have handled this internally like a family should be able to handle their business.”
Since Kita posted her January 21 video, it has surpassed 1.9M views. Subsequent installments of her storytime series entitled “Who TF Did I Work For?” have sparked social media fodder, namely because of her allegations against Nalls that include psychological abuse, wage theft, and workplace sexual affairs.
After four years of working together, Kita said she reached a breaking point after she was informed that her contract wouldn’t be renewed for an upcoming tour later in the year with Tonight’s Conversation that, if she completed, would’ve resulted in a $203,000 payout.
Kita said that for several weeks, Nalls had promised via text and phone calls to send over a renewed contract. When she followed up, however, he had a new reason for why the documentation couldn’t be sent.
“There was always something,” she said. “He said, ‘Yes, I’m going to send you a new contract…this year, you’re going to get what you want’, blah, blah, blah. And then finally, when you’re like, ‘Where’s the contract, Ace? We have a month before the tour.’ He asked me to wait another month. And then I was told that I was invited back.’”
Before Nalls succeeded in digital content creation, he worked as a nurse and moonlit as a poet. After getting written up for a clerical error at work, Nalls decided to record a freestyled poem on social media via live stream.
The next night, he woke up to his first viral video. That moment sparked his interest in pursuing live digital conversations more heavily, and three years later, he officially launched the Tonight’s Conversation podcast.
He said the idea was to meet people where they can evoke authentic dialogue about what seems to matter the most to many: dating and relationships.
Launched as an extension of Ace Metaphor’s brand, which includes books, live events, and viral relationship content, Tonight’s Conversation quickly gained traction. The almost instant success didn’t surprise him, as he says he “hired his friends,” so the conversations were always real, and viewers gravitated to that.
However, that friend-like workplace environment is a throughline that Rossario and Kita Rose named as the root of the conflict, and further reinforced the harmful gossip that adversely affected them.
When asked whether he participated in the gossip, Nalls responded: “False.”
He also shared that he was taking steps to formally shut down the accusations, stating, “We are now suing Kita Rose for defamation of character and Randi is named as a co-conspirator.”
Nalls also asserted that Kita Rose’s social media posts about the conflicts are in violation of a gag order. He said that nearly all of the allegations lobbed against him are untrue, namely the accusation that he was sleeping with fellow panelists.
Before Kita Rose’s January 21 video went live, fellow long-time panelist Tripp Fontaine announced he wasn’t returning to the podcast. When asked if the internal conflict Rossario and Kita Rose alluded to contributed to Fontaine’s departure, Nalls said it didn’t.
“Tripp Fontaine is graduating—he is going into his own lane,” Nalls told ESSENCE. He clarified that the podcast doesn’t have any fixed co-hosts, the podcast operates on a rotational talent system and insisted they be referred to as “panelists.”
ESSENCE reached out to Fontaine for comment, but he didn’t respond in time of publication.
When asked about the allegations of sleeping with his colleagues, namely other panelists, Nalls said, “I’ve never slept or had any inappropriate relationships with any of our cast mates at all.”
Kita Rose’s allegations of psychological abuse are also unfounded, according to Nalls, and stem from her not being able to continue working with him. Nalls also alludes the same about Rossario, who, according to him, did not willingly leave the podcast and has since asked to come back.
“There was a willingness for these two individuals (that we moved on from) to return,” he told ESSENCE. “There was a desire for those individuals to come back. They wanted to come back to Tonight’s Conversation. We moved on. We chose not to recast them. So, we’re now taking the legal route to dispel the rumors and the allegations. It has never been my goal to get online and disparage anybody. That’s not what I want to do. That’s not what I want to become. But right now, I must say those rumors about me gossiping and rumoring are categorically false.”
He explained that his hand was forced to sue due to Kita Rose weaponizing his experience of being a sexual abuse victim against him among other “lies.”
Nells also shared that the allegations against him in which Kita Rose claimed he had not paid her owed monies are false.
Both personalities have taken to the internet to share “receipts” with Nalls, releasing audio that implies an extortion attempt by Kita Rose. She responded with her own audio recording of a conversation with what is alleged to be Nalls’s voice alluding to a payout of $500,000 in exchange for her silence.
Kita Rose also alleges that Nalls didn’t follow through on repaying her for merchandise she spent more than $100,000 on, and that Nalls has possession of.
Nalls denies the claims.
“We’ve had discussions around potentially doing X, Y, and Z, or potentially doing X, Y, and Z,” he said. “But the narrative of I said I’m going to do this… anything I said that I was going to do that we agreed on, we’ve always put in contracts. And that’s how we’ve always run from day one of Tonight’s Conversation.”
He added: “Outside of the contracts, there are things that you might do to help someone, which I have done to help. You know what I mean? But ultimately, the distortion of this being something that is a financial abuse situation has been grossly exaggerated into something that I don’t believe happened.”
What’s Next?
Tonight’s Conversation will be embarking on another tour, Nalls confirmed. He’s hoping to put the controversy behind him.
“My overall hope is that everybody is successful,” he told ESSENCE. “ I want everybody to find their happiness, and I don’t have any ill will towards anyone, no matter what’s going on in this case. It’s so awkward for me because I never want to say anything negative about any one of those people. That’s never been my goal. I’m {speaking out} because I think there is enough public interest to say there needs to be a balancing of the story. But it’s not in my character. It’s never been part of my character, and I wanted to be part of it. My hope is I never have to do this again.”
These interviews were edited for clarity and brevity.