The Dancing with the Stars champion and the American wildlife photographer have been friends since at least 2018. Irwin says he keeps his personal life private.
Robert Irwin is reported to be dating Ashleigh Scully, a 24-year-old wildlife photographer from New Jersey, although neither of them has confirmed it. Irwin, 22, is not married.
Us Weekly reported on 17 June, citing an unnamed source, that Scully had been “traveling all over” with Irwin “for months”, including some stops on the Dancing with the Stars live tour. The rumours began in February with a photo from a dive trip and grew in March, when the Daily Mail and TMZ published pictures of the pair together on the Gold Coast.
When a Daily Mail reporter asked Irwin at Sydney Airport on 12 August whether there was a special someone in his life, he said:
“Yeah, well, I keep that pretty private. Everything with my personal life.”
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How do Irwin and Scully know each other?
In 2018 Scully, then a teenager, posted a photo of herself with Irwin, his mother Terri and his sister Bindi, asking her followers to oppose a planned grizzly bear trophy hunt in Wyoming. “Please consider joining me and my friends, the Irwins, by speaking up on behalf of Wyoming’s grizzly bears,” the post read, according to PerthNow.
Us Weekly and TMZ say the two have known each other since 2019. That was the year the Australian magazine Woman’s Day reported that Irwin, then 15, had grown close to Scully after they met in the US. Her grizzly post shows they had met at least a year earlier.
Both are photographers, and both have won at the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year in London. Scully took the 11 to 14 category in 2017 with a picture of a red fox plunging head first into snow to hunt in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley. Irwin’s drone image of a bushfire on Cape York won the competition’s People’s Choice Award in February 2021. In 2025 they sat on the same judging panel for the Crikey! Magazine Photography Competition, run by Australia Zoo, the Queensland wildlife park the Irwin family owns.
Who is Ashleigh Scully?
Scully grew up in northern New Jersey and now lives in Jackson, Wyoming. She photographs wildlife, much of it underwater or in the Arctic, and posts the results on Instagram as @ascullyphoto.
Whales are the species that sparked her love of photography, by her own account. She saw her first one in 2010, aged eight, from a National Geographic ship sailing from Sitka to Juneau in Alaska. Looking back on the trip in a September 2025 Instagram post, she recalled the captain going through the ship’s rulebook with her because some passengers had come on holiday to sleep in. For the rest of the voyage she got up at five every morning to scan the water on her own. “Only those times,” she wrote, “I kept the whales to myself.”
Photography was something she rarely talked about at school. In a long post about her life on 14 September this year, she described an “awkward eighth grade field trip to DC and the Smithsonian” that left her class in the same room as one of her pictures. “From then on I never quite lived that down.” At 15 she was named Youth Photographer of the Year in the 2017 Nature’s Best awards for a picture of two brown bear cubs wrestling in a meadow. The winning images went on show at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
Texas Christian University in Fort Worth recruited her at 16 to ride for its equestrian team, which competes at Division 1, the top level of American college sport. She rode for five seasons and was one of the team’s four captains in 2024-25. TCU Magazine, profiling her that spring, described her as a first-team All-American. Alongside the riding she earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in literature, with a master’s thesis on the rise and fall of the nineteenth-century whaling industry. “It wasn’t until I went to university pursuing athletics where I met people who encouraged me to come out of my shell and share the entirety of my story,” she wrote in September.
She is a certified diver and has photographed humpback whales underwater in Tonga and the Dominican Republic. In April she dived with tiger sharks in the Maldives, and in late spring she completed a three-week glacial mountaineering course in Alaska’s Chugach Range. Her post in early October summed up the year: “This year I tried to grow gills and loved every second of it. Five continents later and now it’s time for a few months on land!”
What are the dating reports based on?
| Date (2026) | What happened |
|---|---|
| Early February | Dylan Efron, who became friends with Irwin on Dancing with the Stars, posts a group photo from a dive trip showing Irwin and Scully in scuba gear. Fans call it a soft launch |
| 24 March | The Daily Mail and TMZ publish photos of the pair arriving at the Gold Coast set of DWTS: The Next Pro, which Irwin hosts |
| Late April | Irwin makes guest appearances on the Dancing with the Stars live tour. Us Weekly’s source later says Scully joined some stops |
| 17 June | Us Weekly reports that they are dating |
| 7 July | They are photographed arriving at Hulu’s studio in New York |
| Mid-July | Both post photos from the summit of Grand Teton in Wyoming. New Idea reports that Irwin appears in the background of one of hers |
TMZ noted there was no PDA in the Gold Coast pictures, which the Daily Mail said also showed another woman with the pair. In New York, according to the Daily Mail, the two kept their distance from each other to avoid being photographed together.
A source quoted by In Touch in early July went further, saying Terri and Bindi had “concerns” that the romance was moving too fast. The same source said the family thinks Scully “seems lovely”.
What has Irwin said about dating?
More than a year before the Scully reports, Irwin joked about being single. He told People in April 2025 that he was “waiting for that American tourist to come into the zoo and for it all to happen!” The line was a nod to his own family. “My mom and dad met when she was this American tourist coming over to Australia, and that’s also how my sister met her husband,” he told the magazine that September. After the Us Weekly story, InStyle was quick to point out that Scully is American.
Dating in the spotlight is “so challenging to navigate”, he told The New York Times in November 2025, because “anything you do will be on TikTok the next day”. Asked on Sydney radio station KIIS FM on 19 January 2026 whether he was single, he replied: “Oh, we’re going straight in for the exclusive. Yes, yes.” A month later, when Entertainment Tonight raised rumours that he could be the next Bachelor, he said: “I’m a zookeeper. That’s my thing.” By August, four days before he hosted the Logies, he was declining to discuss his love life.
Who has Robert Irwin dated before?
Irwin’s ex-girlfriend Rorie Buckey, a niece of the late actor Heath Ledger, is the only partner he has been public with. They were first reported to be dating in November 2022, and her father, Nathan Buckey, confirmed the relationship to the Daily Mail that December. The couple walked their first red carpet together on 3 July 2023 at the Sydney premiere of Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One.
Asked on Nova’s Fitzy & Wippa in November 2023 to rate the relationship out of ten, Irwin said: “Love is not a numbers game, you just feel it.” Three months later, on 16 February 2024, the pair said in a joint Instagram statement that they had “decided to go our separate ways” and asked for privacy.
Two other names came up during his Dancing with the Stars run in late 2025:
- Xochitl Gomez, the Season 32 champion, danced a jive with Irwin on the show’s 20th birthday episode on 11 November 2025. “We had the best time,” he told TMZ. Before the 25 November final, Gomez said on a TikTok Live that she was single.
- Hailey Bills, a dancer in the show’s troupe, was the subject of fan theories after a TikTok video in October 2025. Fans also connected a DeuxMoi blind item to her, although it did not name her.
Is Robert Irwin married?
Irwin has never been married. The married sibling is Bindi, who wed the American Chandler Powell at Australia Zoo in March 2020. Their daughter, Grace, was born in 2021.
New Idea ran engagement rumours on 10 August while acknowledging there had been no public confirmation. No split between Irwin and Scully has been reported.
