He's the pop star who overcame sex and drug addiction to find God. But after he wed model Hailey, they both said marriage was tough. So... What DID spark Justin Bieber's tears which sent his 292 million online followers into a frenzy?
The tear coursing down his cheek in a solitary streak causes no unsightly blotches or bloodshot eyes, but Justin Bieber would have known the furore it would fuel.
Sure enough, after uploading two selfies of himself crying to his 292 million Instagram followers last weekend, pandemonium ensued.
Was the pop star suffering another mental health crisis? His previous battles with everything from drug and sex addiction to low self-esteem have, after all, been well documented since he found fame as a teenager.
Or was he hinting at problems in his five-year marriage to Hailey Baldwin Bieber, 27, a socialite, top model and devout Christian who has been credited not just with helping Justin recover from the excesses of fame, but with keeping his religious faith intact?
The couple have always made clear their marriage is no picnic — or, as Hailey put it in 2019, 'really effing hard' — and rumours of a split circulated online after Hailey was pictured at a pre-Oscars party without Justin in February.
Pandemonium ensued after Justin Bieber uploaded two selfies of himself crying to his 292 million Instagram followers last weekend
The star also posted a picture of himself in Central Park, New York, adding a curious remark about marriage
Hailey appeared to try to quash speculation of any marital issues as she re-posted a picture of Justin
Although gossip sites reported her moving out of the couple's £20 million Beverly Hills mansion and spotted her without her wedding ring, Hailey, daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin and niece of actor Alec Baldwin, dismissed suggestions of a split as 'delusional' and described Justin as the 'love of my life' on his 30th birthday last month.
So far, so supportive. Yet under those Instagram pictures of her husband visibly upset, Hailey wrote Justin was 'a pretty crier', with a smiling cry emoji construed by some as mockery.
So what is the truth behind that tear? And is Justin too troubled for even his loving wife to save?
Given the goldfish bowl level of fame the singer has lived in for nearly three decades, it is perhaps inevitable his mental health has suffered.
R aised in poverty in Ontario, Canada, by his single mother, Pattie Mallette, who he said sometimes suffered depression (his largely absent father Jeremy, he added, 'has anger issues'), the singer found fame, aged 13, after his future manager Scooter Braun found videos of him in a local singing contest his mother had uploaded to YouTube.
By the time he was 16, hits such as One Time and One Less Lonely Girl made him what Justin describes as a 'manufactured' star.
Hailey's privileged upbringing, meanwhile, was a world away from Justin's. One of two sisters, Hailey was homeschooled in New York by her devoutly Christian parents — mother Kennya, 56, and father Stephen, 57, a recovering cocaine addict whose films include The Usual Suspects and Born On The Fourth Of July.
'I have serious morals that are instilled in me because of how I was raised,' Hailey has said.
She appeared nonplussed on meeting Justin for the first time in 2009 backstage during his appearance on America's Today show. He was 15, she 12. She had been given tickets to the show by her uncle Alec.
'Everybody had a crush on him,' Hailey later said. 'But for the first few years we had a weird age gap.'
Of course, despite his heartthrob status and an army of fans called 'Beliebers', Justin, who started smoking marijuana at '12 or 13', was still youthfully vulnerable. Last month, footage emerged of the then 15-year-old with Sean 'Diddy' Combs, the rapper who is facing an ongoing sex trafficking investigation.
In the video, Combs talks about spending 48 hours with the singer in search of girls.
'Right now (Justin is) having 48 hours with Diddy, him and his boy,' Combs says. 'They're having the times of their lives, like where we hanging out and what we're doing we can't really disclose. But it's definitely a 15-year-old's dream.' They are, he says, 'gonna go full buck crazy.'
As Justin's fame grew, his life unravelled, unchecked by boundaries and buffeted by the adulation of his millions of young fans. By 18, he has admitted, he had 'no skills in the real world, with millions of dollars and access to whatever I wanted'.
It was, he recalled, a 'scary' time, during which he describes drugs as 'a numbing agent to just continue to get through'.
Justin has been married to Hailey Baldwin Bieber, 27, a socialite, top model and devout Christian, for five years
Hailey has been credited with helping Justin recover from the excesses of fame
He took 'everything' from alcohol to the tranquilliser Xanax, MDMA and mushrooms, to the extent his staff would check his pulse at night. 'People don't know how serious it got,' he said. 'I was waking up in the morning and the first thing I was doing was popping pills and smoking a blunt and starting my day. It just got scary.'
In 2013, his behaviour became increasingly erratic. The then 19-year-old was accused of throwing eggs at his neighbour's house in an LA celebrity enclave (a lawsuit was settled in 2015); he was pictured leaving a brothel in Brazil and abandoned his pet capuchin monkey in Germany. The following year, in Miami, he was arrested for driving his Lamborghini under the influence.
He was contrite, describing his antics as 'douchey', and somehow managed to keep his adoring fans — and his on-off girlfriend between 2011-2018, actress Selena Gomez — onside.
Then, in 2014, at the height of his volatility, Justin did something wholly unexpected: he found God.
Hailey recalled: 'One day Justin walked into Hillsong [Church in New York] and was like, 'Hey, you got older'. I was like, 'Yeah, what's up?' Over time he became my best guy friend.' Meanwhile, the head of Hillsong, Carl Lentz, persuaded Justin to move into his New Jersey home for an 'informal detox' where the pair played basketball and hockey for several weeks — after which Justin says he stopped taking drugs.
'I'm really proud of him,' Hailey told Vogue in 2019. 'To stick with it without a sober coach or AA or classes. I think it's extraordinary. He is, in ways, a walking miracle.'
In religion, it seems, Justin had found a sense of belonging to replace his self-loathing. By the time he and Hailey reunited at a church conference in Miami in June 2018, he had taken a vow of celibacy, because he said he needed to address his 'legitimate problem with sex', which, he said, 'can cause a lot of pain'.
The 'common denominator' in their reconciliation 'is always church,' Hailey said, while Justin described getting married as his 'calling' and something he was 'compelled' to do.
H e proposed in the Bahamas the following month, and hinted to Vogue that they didn't have sex until after their low-key civil ceremony in New York that September.
Yet marriage has not been the panacea Justin had hoped. As he put it: 'The first year of marriage was really tough.'
He was spotted crying in a car with Hailey and said he had 'a little bit of an emotional breakdown because I thought marriage was going to fix all my problems and it didn't.'
Hailey didn't sound like she was overly enjoying it either, saying in a joint interview with Justin the following year: 'I'm not going to sit here and lie and say it's all a magical fantasy. It's always going to be hard.
'You don't wake up every day saying: 'I'm absolutely so in love and you are perfect.' That's not what being married is.' Marriage was, she continued, 'about wanting to fight for something'.
Fighting with each other was 'good' added Justin, who suggested the couple had been too fearful of saying 'the wrong' thing to express themselves, 'and it's been really difficult to get [Hailey] to say what she feels.'
Of course, millions in the bank have softened some of the emotional blows. In 2023, the Biebers bought their mansion in Beverly Hills, and much of their married life is shared on social media. They have two dogs, Oscar and Piggy Lou, and matching Peach tattoos to celebrate Justin's number one single of the same name.
Having children — something they've both professed a desire for — will take 'a whole other season of navigating,' Hailey says, not least because her modelling career has gone stratospheric. Her net worth is now estimated at £16 million and in 2022 she launched Rhode, her skincare and beauty line.
There are plans, too, to branch into acting. 'I'd love to be a Bond girl,' she has said.
Justin, meanwhile, hasn't released an album since Justice in 2021, and still seems to be in search of elusive peace.
A friend speculates that after Justin's intense levels of fame, 'standard levels of dopamine just don't get you excited any more'. Others speculate that his fractured upbringing is to blame.
Though Justin has praised his wife for having 'walked hand and hand with me as I continue to get my emotions, mind, body and soul in tact [sic]!', one wonders just how much longer she is prepared to do that — and whether cracks in his five-year marriage are the real factor behind this week's tears.
