Twelve-time Olympic medal winning swimmer Ryan Lochte stunned fans this week by announcing he has taken a $30,000-a-year assistant coaching gig with Missouri State University.

It’s been a rocky few years for the champion after battling depression so crippling some days he couldn’t even get out of bed, he told The Post in an exclusive interview from his current home in Gainesville, Florida.

Last August, he also went to rehab and he’s still in the midst of a bitter divorce from his estranged wife, Kayla Rae Reid, the mother of his three children, Caiden Zane, 8, Liv Rae, 6, and two-year-old Georgia June.

But amid the turmoil, the 41-year-old has found love again with girlfriend Molly Gillihan, whom he credits for getting him back on his feet, and he is soon hoping to marry.

“After the 2021 Olympic trials, I was in a very big depression,” the six-time gold medal winner reveals. “My mental health was gone and the household that I was living in, it was toxic and it wasn’t good for me.

“I was lost and it didn’t help that my other partner at the time would say, ‘You’re worthless, you’re a loser. You need to get up and get a job.’ And I was like, ‘I really can’t. I don’t know what to do. I’m lost.”

Lochte was left reeling further after being in an almost fatal car wreck in 2023, and admits he then dived into alcohol and drugs. 

“I just did it to escape the hell that I was living in,” he says. “It was mostly weed and cocaine. Yeah, it’s horrible. I look at myself now and I’m just like, what the hell was I ever thinking?

Despite accusations by Reid, Lochte insists, “I never did drugs in front of the kids” and does not consider himself to have ever been addicted.

After his stint in rehab, he went into therapy, which has greatly helped him. Now he says he’ll have a drink every now and then, including a glass of champagne recently to celebrate his one-year anniversary with Gillihan — and he does not touch drugs.

Lochte readily admits the biggest turning point was at the Olympics in Rio 2016, when he was caught up in a major scandal, lying about being robbed at gunpoint.

He and three teammates, Gunnar Bentz, Jack Conger, and Jimmy Feigen, had actually vandalized a gas station bathroom and paid security for damages. The Brazilian authorities did not take kindly to the initial accusations and the fallout led to lost sponsorships, a 10-month suspension for Lochte and widespread public backlash. He ended up losing major sponsors including Ralph Lauren and Speedo, which cost him about $2 million a year.

“It was the biggest wake-up call,” he says. “It was the biggest fall that I’ve ever had and I fell into a black hole and I couldn’t get out. And I tried to climb out and then once I got out, I got knocked back down…It happened multiple times after 2016.

“No-one ever taught me what happens when you become famous or when you get all this money,” he added, “No one ever told me about financial literacy. No one ever told me about ever when you’re on top of the mountain and you fall down, how to get back up. No one never taught me that.

“But now I did it. I guess I was the guinea pig for myself and now I can honestly change people’s lives. I can help them, make them reach their dreams, their goals that I once had when I was a little kid and I could help them get there.”

Since his marriage split and moving out of his marital home, Gillihan has given him a new lease on life. He says she’s his biggest supporter, “even though she had no idea what I did in the Olympics, which is so funny.”

The couple met as their kids attend the same school in Gainesville. It was due to his new partner — a kindergarten teacher and mom-of-three — that Lochte found his position with MSU, as Gillihan, 37, originally hails from Missouri. 

Lochte said that “from day one” her family has been very open to him and down-at-home.

“They didn’t care that I was Ryan Lochte, the swimmer. They just wanted to know me. And they fell in love with me. I fell in love with them. And every time that we go back to Missouri, I feel like at home… I just feel at peace,” he says.

After reaching out to schools in Missouri, Lochte was offered two jobs. Although much has been made of his $34-an-hour salary, he makes it clear that’s not his motivation. 

He recently made $385,000 from selling nine of his Olympic medals, and is a brand ambassador for Friss Labs, a company specializing in energy pouches. He also rakes in money from social media sponsorships.

“I’m financially A-OK to support me and my entire Brady Bunch family,” the sportsman added. “I took this job because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do this. When I was swimming, I had a fire burning inside of me of becoming the best and that’s what drove me every day, every year.”

Asked if it was difficult to let go of his medals, he mused,,”The thing that gets me the most is the journey that it took me to get there. The medals – they were just collecting dust in a sock drawer.”

But he denied having to make the sale because he was strapped for cash. “A lot of people got that wrong…all the media that was saying, “Oh, we have a lien on our house, the taxes and everything’.

“Do I have some tax debt? yes, but I did it because I don’t need them. And I’ve done the hard work. I cherish those memories…and if I got money from it, great!”

Lochte started training when he was just eight; he became hooked after watching Pablo Morales win the 100-meter butterfly at the 1992 Olympics. Although he initially struggled when he went to the University of Florida, things soon clicked.

“I started having that mamba mentality,” he said, referencing basketball great Kobe Bryant’s philosophy. “I started having that fire inside of me; I was a lion and I was hunting.”

He won his 12 Olympic medals — three silver and three bronze, in addition to the six golds — over four Summer Olympic Games, spanning 2004 to 2016. He won medals in Athens (2004), Beijing (2008), London (2012), and Rio de Janeiro (2016). His team still holds a world record in the 4×200-meter freestyle relay.

But his bid to make his fifth Olympic team fell short at the 2021 US Olympic Swimming Trials in Omaha, Nebraska. The then-36-year-old finished seventh in the 200-meter individual medley final.

After 2021, “I lost all the fire in me,” Lochte admits. “I didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. 

“I just lost everything because I felt like I was a failure. I was in so much depression and my partner at the time wasn’t helping me and I was just getting lost. I was looking at myself in the mirror every day and being like.. who the f–k am I? And it was rough. And I went for years like that.”

At first, he didn’t have any therapy, believing he could help himself. But his parents and siblings were worried, telling him, “You got to get out of this funk.”

“There was some points where I was so depressed that I didn’t even get out of my bed to go down to the mailbox, and it started affecting me as a father, which was killing me inside,” Lochte reveals, “But I didn’t know how to get out of that depression. I had no idea.”

Of Reid, who filed for divorce in March 2025 after seven years of marriage, he says, “We lost the love for each other a long, long time ago and we just stayed together for the kids and I was getting just beaten down emotionally and I turned to drugs and alcohol.”

Lochte is not alone in having suffered mental health issues. Olympic stars from his teammate Michael Phelps to gymnastics icon Simone Biles have spoken about their own battles.

“People think we could fall off a cliff and we’d come out with no bruises, no cuts,” he says. “No, it’s not that. We’re real people. We’ve just trained and outworked everyone else to get to where we are. We still bleed, we still cry, we still laugh. So yeah, mental health is very a big issue and I see it more and more in the younger generation now in sports.”

Indeed, Phelps, 40, has been a great pal and support. “He went through the same with depression,” said Lochte, “He was the one that helped me a lot along the way. We’re good friends. We talk probably once or twice every month.”

Lochte says after he met Gillihan it was as if a “weight lifted off my shoulder .. The fun, loving guy started coming back.”

Asked if they plan to wed, he beams, “Oh, 100 percent. Lock that down! There’s no way I couldn’t. She’s my best friend and my entire life, I’ve dated girls all the time. I’ve gotten married, but I’ve never been with a girl that was my best friend and love her at the same time and I found it. I found it with Molly and that is true love. 

“I have unconditional love for her and for her kids and she has the exact same for me and my kids. We’re a power couple and we can conquer anything.”

The pair will travel by RV to Missouri in June and look for a new home. 

Lochte has joint custody of his kids and will visit them in Florida once a month, while they will spend summer vacations with him.

His son already has amazing skills in the water and does a “perfect butterfly” after watching his dad’s old videos. But after one swimming practice, he said, “Daddy, swimming sucks.” 

“I told him “Buddy, you’re eight years old. Go play. Don’t worry. Just go play,” Lochte laughs.

“The only good thing about all the highs and lows that I’ve been through is I can help other people out now,” he says.

“I’m a free bird and I’m loving life to the fullest and nothing’s knocking me down.”