What a desperate cry for help.
Justin Bieber, who has fallen apart in recent months, posted an alarming, self-loathing confessional on Thursday.
‘People told me my whole life, “Wow Justin, u [sic] deserve that”,’ he wrote on Instagram. ‘And I personally have always felt unworthy. Like I was a fraud. Like when people told me I deserve something, it made me feel sneaky like, damn if they only knew my thoughts. How judgmental I am, how selfish I really am. They wouldn’t be saying this. I say all this to say. If you feel sneaky, welcome to the club. I definitely feel unequipped and unqualified most days.’
It makes you wonder if Bieber, 31, knows how much people are rooting for him.
Or if he has any sense that decent folk everywhere look at that old video — the one with a 15-year-old Bieber, formerly a small-town Canadian kid shot into stratospheric fame, beaming next to Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs — and have but one thought: Where were this kid’s parents?
That clip, shot in 2009, shows Bieber looking even younger than his age. He comes across as childlike, very naïve, despite — or, more likely, because of — his sudden fame.
Justin Bieber, who has fallen apart in recent months, posted an alarming, self-loathing confessional on Thursday.
Diddy, then around 40 years old, brags about spending an entire weekend with Bieber.
‘Where we hangin’ out and what we doin’, we can’t really disclose,’ Diddy says. ‘But it’s definitely a 15-year-old’s dream. You know, I have been given custody of him.’
This is the stuff Diddy admitted to in public, on camera.
Truly: What 40-year-old man spends 48 hours with a teenager he isn’t related to?
Diddy goes on to talk about mentoring Usher and being granted ‘legal guardianship’ of the then-unknown performer ‘when he did his first album’.
Usher was then only 13 years old, sent off to live with Diddy in New York City. Like Bieber, he was the only son of a financially struggling single mother and an absent father.
In other words, both were particularly vulnerable boys with mothers who might have done anything to vaunt their sons into fame and fortune — even if that meant leaving them alone with Diddy, who already had quite the criminal history.
In a 2016 interview with Howard Stern, Usher, now a parent himself, expressed disbelief that his mother allowed any of it.
‘Hell no,’ he said when asked if he would ever send his children to live with Diddy.
‘I got a chance to see some things’, Usher said. ‘I don’t know if I could indulge and understand what I was even looking at. It was pretty wild.’
He had been more specific with Rolling Stone in 2004. Diddy, Usher said then, exposed him to ‘a totally different set of s*** — sex, specifically. Sex is so hot in the industry, man. There was [sic] always girls around. You’d open a door and see somebody doing it, or several people in a room having an orgy. You never knew what was going to happen.’
Justin Bieber should know that public sentiment is with him. No one wants to see him cancelled. No one would blame him for anything he may have witnessed as a child left with a monster like Diddy.
Though Bieber’s lawyers have denied that his recent struggles have anything to do with Diddy’s arrest in September 2024, the timelines are parallel.
No one wants to see Bieber self-destruct. No one wants him to experience a Britney-like series of public meltdowns, looking gaunt, unwell, underdressed and self-medicating, as he appeared to be doing with weed in photos he posted last week.
Bieber is now married and the father of a 6-month-old boy. This should be the happiest time of his life. But, as a friend recently pointed out to me, survivors of trauma – and child stardom certainly counts – are often re-traumatized when they have their own children.
Having a baby suddenly makes a harsh truth all too clear: Why wasn’t anyone around to protect me?
It makes you wonder if Bieber, 31, knows how much people are rooting for him. Or if he has any sense that decent folk everywhere look at that 2009 video – the one with a 15-year-old Bieber, formerly a small-town Canadian kid shot into stratospheric fame, beaming next to Diddy – and have but one thought: Where were this kid’s parents? (Pictured: Diddy and Bieber in 2014).
No one wants to see Bieber self-destruct. No one wants him to experience a Britney-like series of public meltdowns, looking gaunt, unwell, underdressed and self-medicating, as he appeared to be doing with weed in photos he posted last week.
Bieber has spoken of being estranged at alternate points from both his mother — who cashed in on her son’s fame with a book called Nowhere But Up: The Story of Justin Bieber’s Mom — and his dad, who bragged about his son’s penis size after nude photos of Justin leaked online.
‘My boy,’ he tweeted, adding a none-too-subtle cactus emoji.
Wolves would have done a better job, I think.
His father has also received severe backlash for his continued oversight of an Instagram account that shares pics of daughter and Bieber’s half-sister, Bay. She is six years old.
Justin Bieber appears to have been betrayed, or let down, by nearly every adult in his life: His parents, his former management and his most important ‘mentor’, Sean Combs, who helped launch him to global stardom at what seems an incalculable price.
After Combs was arrested last year, an insider told Us Weekly that Bieber was ‘completely disgusted’ by the charges against Combs and has been ‘advised to stay as far away as possible’ from anything having to do with it.
Easier said than done. Who in Bieber’s life will show up for him now?
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