A sixth wedding anniversary would normally be a cause of joy and laughter. But when Justin and Hailey Bieber emerged from the Los Angeles restaurant where they had been celebrating theirs on Monday night, they looked like they were leaving a funeral.
As his model wife, dressed down in jeans and baggy jumper, walked several paces ahead of him, staring fixedly at the floor, the 30-year-old pop superstar followed behind, looking tense, his eyes and face hidden behind dark glasses and a baseball cap.
How different from a year ago when they released loving photos of one another amid mutual expressions of devotion online.
One reason for their drained appearance could be the sleepless nights experienced by so many new parents – the birth of the couple’s first child Jack Blues Bieber was announced in August – but many suspect that they may have been under strain since Bieber’s friend and mentor, the music mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, was engulfed by a sex and abuse scandal.
Last month, Diddy was sensationally charged with racketeering, ‘sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion’ and ‘transportation to engage in prostitution’.
Many suspect Justin and Hailey Bieber have been under strain since his mentor Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs was engulfed by an abuse scandal last month. They are pictured leaving a restaurant in Los Angeles on Monday night
Since then, scores of accusers – male as well as female and including a boy as young as nine – have come forward to say Combs, 54, sexually abused them, often in exchange for a promise to advance their music careers.
When Canadian Bieber exploded on to the pop world aged 15, he was taken in hand by Combs and by R&B star Usher, who owed his own career in large measure to Combs.
Bieber was still a teenager when he started going to Combs’s parties and, as recently as last year, collaborated on songs for the rapper’s new album, still calling him his ‘brother’.
He has yet to comment publicly on the stunning charges against his old friend – charges that Combs denies – amid claims by insiders he has shut himself off from the outside world to live in a ‘baby bubble’.
However, his silence has done nothing to quell fevered speculation that the pop icon’s mental issues may not be unconnected with his relationship with Combs.
While there is no suggestion that Bieber is one of Combs’s alleged victims, few would consider the tutelage of a suspected abuser to be an ideal place to grow up.
‘Beliebers’, as hardcore fans are known, have been picking through his career – from the songs he’s sung to the interviews he’s given – for any signs of such trauma.
He’s certainly touched on the difficulties – particularly the isolation – faced by young stars in songs such as 2021’s Lonely in which he sings: ‘What if you had it all / With no-one to call / Then you’d know me.’
When Bieber (centre) exploded onto the pop scene aged 15, he was taken in hand by Combs (left) and began attending the rapper’s famous parties when he was still a teenager
Some fans believe the video for another of his hits, Yummy, contains hidden references to Diddy’s famous ‘white parties’.
Meanwhile, another song that has gone viral on social media is one in which Bieber sings: ‘Lost myself at a Diddy party / Didn’t know that’s how it goes / I was in it for a new Ferrari / But it cost me way more than my soul’ appears to have been a clever fake created with artificial intelligence.
Old videos of Bieber and Combs together have also been widely shared by those looking for telling evidence.
Some argue that the precocious Bieber should have been better protected by his parents – a dysfunctional pair who allowed their son to plunge into an adult world where alleged abusers could act without compunction.
In one now notorious encounter, when Bieber was 15 and starting to become famous, Combs, 24 years older, proclaims: ‘He’s having 48 hours with Diddy, where we hanging out and what we’re doing we can’t really disclose. But it’s definitely a 15-year-old’s dream.’
Asked what he wants to do with a man who has promised they’re ‘gonna go buck fool crazy’, Bieber tells his friend, ‘Let’s go get some girls’, to which Combs replies: ‘Man after my heart. That’s what I’m talking about.’
However, in another interaction reportedly recorded the following year, Bieber looks far more uncomfortable with Combs, who chides him for supposedly keeping his distance and not ‘calling me and hanging out the way we used to hang out’. Bieber seems to suggest that his ‘business partners’ kept them apart.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. At the time, nobody questioned why a man pushing 40 wanted to ‘hang out’ with a 15-year-old – as, of course, few did when alleged paedophile Michael Jackson (a star who Combs once admitted was his ‘dream collaboration’) surrounded himself with prepubescent boys.
Bieber and Combs together at a Grammy Awards afterparty in Los Angeles in 2016
Videos are also circulating of Bieber and Combs dancing at what appear to be two separate Diddy parties, although neither was one of the stomach-churning ‘freak-off’ orgies at the centre of the criminal charges against the older star.
Unsurprisingly, Bieber fans have also drawn attention to a 2020 interview in which Bieber became tearful while describing how he’d wanted to protect Gen Z superstar singer Billie Eilish from the excesses of the music industry.
‘I don’t want her to go through anything I went through. I don’t wish that upon anybody,’ he said. ‘It was bad… it was dark. Think about how young I was and so impressionable… I just want people to understand the psychology of why I potentially could have problems in my life.’
Insiders close to Bieber have insisted he was completely ‘thrown’ by the criminal charges against Combs. They add that the claims have caused him considerable stress and pain at a time when he was trying to concentrate on family life.
‘Justin feels like there is no one he can talk to that understands and, to be honest, he doesn’t even fully understand,’ a source told . ‘He was a kid.’
But the accusations against Combs get worse by the day. Prosecutors in New York, where he is being held in a notoriously-unpleasant detention centre, claim he orchestrated ‘a criminal enterprise’ that engaged in sex trafficking, drugs offences, forced labour, arson, bribery, kidnapping and decades of physical abuse against women dating back to 2008.
It’s alleged that Combs would not only force women to take part in his ‘freak-off’ sex marathons with prostitutes but record them, so he could use the footage as leverage against participants.
Some of his accusers claim Combs would spike the drinks of people he wanted for his freak-offs with a cocktail of drugs that included cocaine, Viagra and the horse tranquilliser ketamine.
Fans have drawn attention to a 2020 interview in which Bieber cried while describing how he didn’t want singer Billie Eilish ‘to go through anything I went through’ in the music industry
Jaguar Wright, a singer and songwriter, has sensationally claimed Combs managed to sell a video of various celebrities taking part in freak-offs for $500million on the dark web, although there is no evidence such a tape exists.
Ariel Mitchell-Kidd, a lawyer for one of Combs’s accusers, says a pornographic video of Combs with an even more famous celebrity – who she didn’t identify – is being ‘shopped around’ Hollywood.
Combs’s ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura has accused the rapper of subjecting her to physical and sexual abuse including beating her and forcing her to have sex with a succession of male prostitutes while he filmed. He apologised for a physical assault which took place in 2016 but ‘vehemently denies’ all other allegations
However, it wasn’t just women who were allegedly the object of Combs’s sexual predations. His former record producer, Rodney ‘Lil Rod’ Jones, is also suing him for sexual assault.
At a press conference on Tuesday, matters became immeasurably more serious for Combs when Texas lawyer Tony Buzbee announced he is representing 120 additional accusers who say the star sexually abused them between 1991 and today.
They include 25 people who were under-age at the time, including a nine-year-old boy and other boys who were as young as 14 and 15.
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I went to a Diddy White Party when I was just six years old and this is what I saw
The nine-year-old claims he was taken to an audition at Combs’s, Bad Boy Records company, in New York, where – according to his legal claim – ‘This individual was sexually abused allegedly by Sean Combs and several other people at the studio in the promise to both his parents and to him himself of getting a record deal.’
‘Other boys were there to audition as well,’ said Buzbee. ‘All of them were trying to land a record deal. All of them were minors.’
Combs’s lawyer, Erica Wolff, says that her client ’emphatically and categorically denies as false and defamatory any claim that he sexually abused anyone, including minors’.
Bieber wasn’t the only young celebrity befriended by Combs, who has been accused of trying hard to attract the famous to his parties in order to gain an aura of respectability. This week, Christopher Andersen, a biographer of King Charles, said Diddy attempted to invite princes William and Harry to his ‘wild’ parties in their bachelor days but, thanks to their ‘palace handlers’, those invitations were ‘wisely turned down’.
Sadly, it appears Bieber had no such handlers looking out for his interests. His rise from impoverished obscurity in Ontario to become one of the biggest music artists was meteoric – his debut album topped the US charts in 2010 when he had just turned 16.
But the young Justin’s image as a squeaky-clean, God-fearing, boy-next-door teen idol would soon be swept away as he went spectacularly off the rails and his private life descended into chaos.
In 2014, Bieber – behind the wheel of a yellow Lamborghini – was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs after police halted a wild pre-dawn race on the streets of Miami Beach. It was just one among myriad accusations of obnoxious and anti-social behaviour.
In 2019, he went on social media to challenge Tom Cruise to a fight.
His parents, who split up when he was a baby, have been accused of failing to adequately protect their son.
In 2014, Bieber was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs. His parents have been accused of failing to adequately protect their son
Mother Pattie reportedly supplied Bieber with some of the prescription drugs he abused in his youth and sat in on interviews at which he was asked entirely inappropriate questions about his sex life when he was still a minor.
Father Jeremy actually helped his son block off the Miami street on which he conducted his illegal drag race in 2014 and two years later responded to naked pictures of Bieber appearing online, by commenting: ‘He’s a beaut.’
Nevertheless, Bieber now enjoys a positive relationship with both his parents.
And Bieber Sr is not the only one who’s been accused of queasily exploiting the sex appeal of the baby-faced, mop-topped teen.
A compilation video shared widely on social media this week shows various examples of apparently uncomfortable moments for Bieber in those years.
They include Katy Perry touching his bottom, James Corden gushing over his smell, Ellen DeGeneres showing a naked picture of him on her chat show and actress Jenny McCarthy grabbing him on stage at an awards ceremony and forcibly kissing him.
‘Wow I feel violated right now,’ he told the audience.
In another instance, a female radio host asked him to talk about sex. ‘I really, I feel uncomfortable right now,’ he replied. ‘Why do you want to know the sex talk from a 15-year-old boy? That’s pretty weird.’
Also ‘weird’ was a cryptic social media video recently put out by Bieber’s father-in-law, actor Stephen Baldwin, in which he said: ‘There’s a calm and then a storm and then another calm, and in that latter calm is the preparation for… the next storm.’
Many believe he was referring to Justin Bieber but, if so, what calm and what storm?