Grief is complex – but why did so many people target Liam Payne’s ex after his death?
If you’ve read about Liam Payne this week, you’ve probably also read about his former girlfriend Maya Henry. And if you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of social media, much of what you’ve read won’t have been pleasant. “It’s all your fault,” reads one comment on the model’s most recent Instagram post. “Are you happy now?” asks another. There are entire diatribes about Henry’s character, her career, and her upbringing. It appears the reflexive instinct among certain grieving fans has been to blame Payne’s death on Henry, and abuse her incessantly as a result.
It goes without saying that the death of the former One Direction star, who suffered a fatal fall from a balcony in Argentina last week at the age of 31, is a tragedy that has shaken to the core even those who were never 1D fans in the first place. Payne joins the list of famous, talented, beautiful men whose all-too-short lives were marred by struggles with drugs and alcohol. River Phoenix. Kurt Cobain. Jim Morrison, and so on. Over time, these deaths acquire their own eerie mythology. The curious tragic romanticism we apply to them conceals the many broken lives left behind: girlfriends, exes, children.
With Payne, the simultaneous glorification and horror have been heightened by social media. An active user of Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, the musician allowed fans to feel as if they knew him. The reaction to his death has for many felt akin to losing a real-life friend. Because that’s who he was to so many people, a relatable, cheeky chappy who got caught up in the dizzying heights of fame. He was someone people connected to. They were on his side, and he was on theirs.
One consequence of this is that many fans have struggled to contemplate the idea of their hero being capable of causing harm. Wives, girlfriends and former lovers are almost always blamed and harassed when deaths like Payne’s happen: many Nirvana fans blamed Cobain’s suicide on his wife, Courtney Love, with whom he had a famously tumultuous relationship. More recently, Ariana Grande was berated following the death of her former partner, Mac Miller, who died of an overdose in 2018.
Yet the vitriol directed at Henry has been egregious. She and Payne were first linked in 2018 shortly after he split from Cheryl Tweedy, with whom he had a now-seven-year-old son, Bear. The pair got engaged in 2020 but split the following year before reconciling briefly and later breaking up for good in May 2022. Two years later, at which point Payne was in a relationship with influencer Kate Cassidy, Henry released a novel called Looking Forward, about a relationship between a young woman and a former boyband star, Oliver, who had addiction and mental health issues, and which was “inspired by true events”, which fans immediately took to mean it was about Payne. Eerily, at one point Oliver threatens to jump off a balcony. Payne never publicly acknowledged Henry’s novel but that hasn’t stopped fans from weaponising it against her in the wake of his death, using it as further “evidence” that she is to blame and accusing her of being “obsessed” with the musician.
Henry’s side of the story, however, reveals a more complicated truth. In the weeks before his death she had allegedly issued a cease and desist against Payne, claiming that he was repeatedly contacting her, as well as her friends and family. In an eight-minute video posted on TikTok, she claimed: “Ever since we broke up he messages me... it’s always from different phone numbers too, so I never know where it’s gonna come from,” while in a recent episode of The Internet is Dead podcast, posted before Payne’s death, Henry disclosed that, during their relationship, she felt the singer used threats of suicide as a “manipulation tactic”. “He would always message me ever since we broke up [saying], ‘Oh, I’m not well,’” she claimed. “He would always play with death and be like, ‘Well, I’m going to die. I’m not doing well.’”
The only appropriate reaction to this is sympathy on multiple counts. For Henry, whose allegations can only invite horror and pity. And for Payne and whatever state of mind he must have been in to behave in the way Henry has alleged. Who was helping her? Who was helping him? And how long was this going on for, causing an increasing amount of psychological and emotional damage in the process?
Yet there appears to be evidence that the internet is finally acknowledging the multiple truths that can constitute a single person’s life, particularly one so glaringly in the public eye. Many fans, for instance, have responded to the abuse against Henry by calling for compassion and support. “They’re already in Maya Henry’s comments blaming her for his death, I hate everyone,” one person posted on X/Twitter. “A circle of peace and protection around Maya Henry,” added another. There is, it seems, a growing awareness that blaming Henry is not only cruel and unwarranted, it’s also futile, serving only to create further pain.
Payne had been open about his struggles with addiction, which seemed to begin during his time in One Direction. “When we were in the band, the best way to secure us because of how big it got was just lock us in our rooms,” he said on a 2021 episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast. “And of course, what’s in the room? Mini bar. So at a certain point, I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to have a party for one and that just seemed to carry on for many years in my life.”
In July last year, the singer filmed a YouTube video updating fans on the state of his health after a 100-day stint in rehab. “I just needed to take a little bit of time out for myself actually because I kind of became somebody who I didn’t really recognise anymore. And I’m sure you guys didn’t either,” he said. “I was in bad shape up until that point, and I was really happy more than anything when I arrived to kind of put a stopper on life and work.” At the time of filming, Payne had been sober for almost six months. It has also been reported that his record label allegedly dropped him in the days before his death.
Many celebrities, including Justin Bieber, David Beckham, and Paris Hilton, have spoken out in support of Payne following his death. “I still had my demons at 31,” said Robbie Williams in a statement shared on social media. “I relapsed. I was in pain. I was in pain because I relapsed. I relapsed because of a multitude of painful reasons. I remember Heath Ledger passing and thinking ‘I’m next’. By the grace of God and/or dumb luck I’m still here.”
Grief is messy at the best of times. But the death of someone young, talented, famous and much loved prompts unanswerable questions that also implicate us, the public. We’re all involved in this Faustian pact between artistic success and the insatiable maw of celebrity and nearly all of us willingly buy into the illusory intimacy of social media, despite knowing it can only ever be a loose approximation of someone else’s life. But at the end of it all, we are left only with the facts. A young man has died, leaving behind friends, family and a seven-year-old son. And the false gods of celebrity have claimed yet another victim.
