Reflecting on Liam Payne's Complicated Legacy
Two things can be true: Liam Payne was a fixture in many of our childhoods, but he was also a violently abusive individual.
Content warning: this post contains discussions of abuse.
While I knew peripherally of One Direction as a teenager growing up in the 2010s, I could never outright claim that I was a fan; I listened to their most popular songs, had a (secret) crush on Harry Styles, and felt a vague sense of shock when Zayn Malik left the band in 2015. This was partially because it was considered deeply uncool to show an interest in boybands (my friends who did listen to One Direction were mercilessly mocked), and partially because of my own deeply-held misconception that being like “the other girls” was lame, which took years for me to deconstruct as an adult.
Even though my interest in One Direction could be described as casual, for many others, he was a fixture of their adolescence and his death is, by all accounts, a tragedy, especially because of the impact it will have on his family and his young child. However, he leaves behind a complicated legacy, one marred with abuse allegations, and his behavior in the months leading up to his death was erratic at best; while TikTok and social media is now flooded with posts memorializing him, mourning the fact that One Direction will never reunite, and praising him for being a good person, the reality was, he was a deeply flawed, abusive individual who hurt women, namely his ex-fiancée, Maya Henry, whom he started dating when she was barely eighteen and he was twenty-six. Upon the release of her debut novel, Looking Forward, in May of 2024, which was a fictionalized account of their relationship, he reportedly threatened suicide, stating that he “[wasn’t] going to be around much longer.” Following the end of their relationship in 2022, he harassed and threatened her to the point that she sent a cease-and-desist. Following his death, she has been harassed by his fans blaming her for his untimely passing.
Videos posted to TikTok claim that Liam simply “made a mistake,” and that he died thinking that “everyone hated him” when the truth of the matter was not that he was hated; rather, he was receiving rightful scrutiny and backlash for his abusive behavior.
As I stated: two things can be true —- it is very tragic that Liam Payne died, as he was a fixture of our adolescent years, but we also need to recognize that he was a flawed, abusive individual who weaponized his vast, parasocial fanbase to attack and harass his ex-girlfriend, something that has only been compounded in the days following his death. The backlash that he received prior to his death was not undeserved, and the fact that we are now deifying him and blaming his ex-girlfriend, a victim of his behaviors, is disgusting and unacceptable.
On a personal level, I am a survivor of domestic violence, spawning from a relationship during early college. My abuser would purposefully get me high and then take advantage of me, often violently, leaving my body covered with bite-marks and bruises. He would strangle me to the point of losing consciousness. He took nude pictures of me while I was sleeping and circulated them amongst his friends while simultaneously telling me that I was fat and ugly. Despite the fact that it was summer and going on ninety degrees in San Francisco, I wore long sleeves and pants to cover up the evidence; later, my friends told me that they were worried about me, but that they were too afraid to say anything. He was the one to end things; despite the fact that he cheated on and abused me, our split devastated me, and I convinced myself that I somehow deserved what he did to me. Following our breakup, I started having panic attacks out of the fear that I would run into him on my way to class, which manifested in the form of fainting spells. Thankfully, he never harassed me; however, he also never faced any accountability for his actions. In the years following our relationship, I spoke with many women who were also victims of his behavior, revealing that he was an habitual rapist and abuser.
Seeing the backlash that Maya Henry is now facing, all I can think is: what if my abuser was famous, and what if he died? How would I feel to see the man who horrifically abused me venerated by social media, blaming me for his passing? How horrifying would it be to have my social media pages flooded with hateful comments questioning my veracity, who I am as a person? The truth of the matter is, abusive men rarely face comeuppance for their behaviors because we are too busy blaming their victims, unwilling to accept that our favorite flamboyant boozehound pirate, or boyband singer, are flawed individuals who are capable of hurting women. One needs to look no further than the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial, in which her testimony about him sexually assaulting her became a viral TikTok audio, people called her “Amber Turd” (because he claimed that she took a dump on his side of the bed) and painted her as the abuser (who also somehow masterminded the entire relationship1 similar to Amy Dunne in Gone Girl).
In that same vein, it also important to acknowledge that abuse tends to be cyclical in nature. My abuser’s father was a pedophile. Liam Payne was exploited and commodified by the music industry from a young age. He met the mother of his child when she was twenty-four and he was fourteen. However, I say this with the caveat that being abused does not excuse inflicting that same abuse upon others, and merely contextualizes it. There is no excuse for abuse, ever. Abuse is not a mistake. Receiving criticism over being an abuser is not “undeserved backlash”, it is simply being held accountable for your shitty behavior. Claiming otherwise is straight-up abuse apologism, period.
The recent passing of Liam Payne highlights the complex intersection of celebrity culture, accountability, and the enduring nature of abuse. While it is undeniable that he was a staple in our adolescent years, we must not let that prevent us from confronting the reality of his abusive actions and the subsequent tragic consequences. Deifying public figures while vilifying their victims only serves to perpetuate a culture of silence and shame; no one, not even celebrities like Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, and Liam Payne, are above accountability. Furthermore, my own personal experiences with abuse serve as a sobering reminder that the wounds inflicted by abusers extend far beyond their immediate relationships and create a cycle of trauma, which must be recognized in order to be broken. In acknowledging this truth, the onus is on us to foster a more compassionate, productive discourse which respects the voices of survivors and holds abusers accountable, and in doing so, breaks the cycle of abuse that continues to be sustained by our society and popular culture.
Note: As an abuse survivor, I cannot recommend Lundy Bancroft’s book “Why Does He Do That” enough. It is linked here for your reference.
To which I say, you are, for lack of a better term, an unrepentant dunderhead if you subscribe to this theory. Amber Heard was an up-and-coming actress in her early-20s when she started dating Johnny Depp, and Johnny Depp was…well, Johnny Depp, an established household name (with a history of grooming and abuse allegations).