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.
