Maya Henry has said that she was in “unsafe and harmful” situations with them while they were dating.
Note: This piece talks about drug addiction, which may be upsetting for some readers.
For the first time, Liam Payne’s ex-girlfriend has talked about his death.
In August 2019, the former One Direction star and Maya Henry made their relationship public. In November of that year, he asked her to marry him. Following their breakup in May 2022, the singer went on to date Kate Cassidy until his sudden death in October 2024.
The 25-year-old told Rolling Stone Magazine that she loved Payne “deeply,” but he did things that “hurt” her in ways she’ll “never fully understand,” and he kept doing those things after they broke up.
Maya Henry and Liam Payne were engaged in 2019 ( Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/Getty Images for The Business of Fashion)
A week and a half before the singer died, on October 6, 2024, Henry posted on TikTok that she and her family and friends were being bothered by Payne. Following this, her lawyer told the 31-year-old to stop what she was doing.
Before his death on October 16, 2024, Payne didn’t say anything about this in public. He died of “polytrauma” after falling from the third-floor patio of the Casa Sur Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Henry said that the two people first broke up because of “the drug use and addictions.”
“He was something he was not when he was high—so different from when he was sober,” she wrote. “I kept hoping that each event would scare him into getting help, but it never did.”
The model said she was sure she “could fix things” and that “he would change.”
She wrote, “Because I didn’t want to give up on him, I put myself in dangerous and harmful situations and ignored every red flag.” For a while, I thought that love could beat addiction. I thought that if I stayed tough and made enough sacrifices, he would see how much I cared and finally decide to go a different way.
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“But that’s not how abuse works.” I was going under no matter how hard I tried to save him.
He also said that “he was struggling” with some parts of himself and that it wasn’t “betrayals or addiction” that caused them to break up.
“I realized I had spent years on something that wasn’t what I thought it was.” It’s not my fault that he’s having trouble, she said.
She also said that she had “stood by him in his darkest moments” and that she was “left with nothing but emptiness” after it was over.
He said, “I wasn’t just heartbroken; I felt cheated, as I’m sure many women in my situation do.” I do know one thing, though: it wasn’t about me or anything I did. It was about problems I couldn’t change. I had to pick myself in the end. There was no way for me to stay in his world without losing myself, no matter how much it hurt.
She says the thing that hurts her the most now that Payne is dead is that she is “left with the aftermath of his actions that continue to unfold.”
Henry said, “Now that I know how much non-consensual image sharing he did—pictures he took during our relationship and shared without my knowledge or permission—I have to deal with the difficulty of grieving for someone I cared so deeply about, even though they caused me pain.”
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Featured Image Credit: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Elton John AIDS Foundation
