How I Killed Liam Payne

I was there, actually. They never found a trace of me, but I was there. At the bottom of the balcony, holding my arms out with the promise that I'd catch him. I knew a guy who knew a guy who shoved the pink cocaine cocktail down his throat, stuck him in that hotel room and manufactured the need for escape. That's what the people commenting on my YouTube channel must've concluded, at least, once they heard the devastating news of Liam Payne's passing and immediately bombarded me with death threats, internet-coded movements (comments calling my co-host and her mother "disgusting swines" for wearing Indian attire on Instagram, a Change.org petition to remove our episode, etc), and blame.

It was tragic to discover first-hand, on top of the loss, what I had already known inside myself through the outer social media economy: Interviewing a victim of assault would be just as bad, if not worse, than if I had killed the man with my own hands.

Maya Henry, an author, influencer, and NYU student was a guest on the "The Internet Is Dead" podcast on October 14th, following her TikTok posts which detailed Liam Payne's abuse. The video has gotten 164,351 views since it was published and extended far beyond the audience my co-host and I had built prior to her appearance. News sources like NYPost, Vox, Entertainment Tonight, and DailyMail referenced the conversation to break the news of Henry predicting Payne's passing, where she explained that he would often play with death. A friend of his told her on the phone that if something were to happen to him, "Not only would you blame yourself, but the whole world is gonna blame you."

A woman shouldn’t fear coming forward about the abuse she endured because the man who abused her might kill himself. If her sharing requires a detachment, a sense of humor, an understanding that she doesn’t need to prove her experience, then it doesn’t make her guilty. For the record, supplementary reports later informed the public that he wasn't trying to kill himself, but that he had jumped from the balcony to escape his room. He was contained inside said room by the hotel staff at the crux of a nervous breakdown. Payne was inebriated and attempting to break free. He had made the jump once before that night, and this time failed to. I believe it was an accident, but I wasn't there. So I don't truly know.

Seconds after his death hitting online news, we were bombarded on every platform. Comments spanning from, "well now he's dead. you killed him," to "are you happy now?" to "how do two kids with 839 viewers even get this woman," to comparing Henry to Amber Heard and direct personal insults towards me and Sameera Rachakonda, my podcast co-host. Several internet friends of mine from across the world messaged me telling me to be careful— that our faces were everywhere.

Threats came through at every angle via the podcast account's interactions and our personal ones. I apologize for the lack of respect that my imagination may have instigated with such a blunt metaphor for comparison, but I find it important to paint a brutally accurate picture of what it had actually felt like to see an online phenomena reinvent itself in my notifications tab, and what specific image the phenomena reinvented us to be. There may be no imagination greater than that of the internet, and the internet had imagined us to be actual murderers. We had witnessed such a phenomenon afar many times from the perspective of our favorite influences or others who eventually became something other than themselves— only approaching its audience with the suggestion that they were hated online, nothing before or after. To live on as just that moment, forever.

Mass hate was a strange and complicated occurrence to grapple with. I often saw online hate as silly, especially for creators who had so much to be grateful for. When I saw Emma Chamberlain's audience telling her to shower, I thought she should just get over it. Grow up and treat herself to a new pair of Miu Miu's that I know she could afford with her YouTube Adsense fortune and It Girl status, breathing the sentiment like a shibboleth: you can do anything once you’re Internet famous. I understand now that the affluence doesn’t exactly alleviate the bruised sense of self.

Like most experiences, online extremism is something one can be easily selfish about until being hit as the brunt of it. Reading hundreds of nasty comments a day until they’d die down months later made me feel foul. The reassurance from some close friends who took the second to say something kind about the situation was what I found myself surviving on. It’s what allowed me to maintain some sort of crackled self-identity. If everyone in immediate eye-sight hates you, can you continue to convince yourself you are who you think you've been?

As for someone who can't recognize their reaction as victim-blaming, well I would never care what they thought of me. We obviously are coming from separate places of understanding, different worlds entirely. But I did care anyway. I hated being hated. It made me into an angrier person. A sudden understanding emerged for my peers who were so fed up with social policing that they turned towards edgy memes and nihilism. My thought patterns were changed, and I had difficulty feeling compassion for the world around me when so much of my media intake was nauseating.

It's the same unproductive process, parading itself as ‘cancel culture,’ that had sunk its claws in me. An out-of-touch tool that probably will not save us. When an individual is forced to be alone with themself, sometimes they do end up growing and reflecting, but a lot of the time it just makes them resent the people who put them there. It fuels a less mindful environment and makes me wonder, why can't we just talk about it? And be open to each other. Actions have consequences, but I don't believe these consequences are turning us into people who then are better-adjusted to later rejoin society suddenly enlightened. We are all just afraid that we'll end up alone. The power behind this cycle is enough to scare someone straight. I honestly think that for people to come to see these cycles as unproductive, they probably have to undergo being at the receiving end of it. Maybe it's something everyone should experience once. At the same time, I think that would be the end of us.

Recognition that almost anyone could become the target of cancel culture or mass hate, or loneliness, might be a good thing. It (the relatability and equal playing field) cancels it all out, then, and we get closer to something else where that sort of stuff doesn't matter anymore.

The Internet has allowed people to run with their wildest thoughts in the most immediate way we have ever seen before. This is nothing new; the experience itself was born with the online space and has been talked about at different levels since that coming-to-life. I am not an expert on how to dissolve these behaviors as they are only translations of what already exists in human nature to an extreme degree; the reactionary nature can likely only be solved on a grand scale, through a major shift in consciousness and immersive community for the individual.

After Payne's passing, my therapist told me that she saw me on the news. She wanted to see if I was okay. She said that what can happen online currently is not normal and something needs to change. And then she told me it wasn't my fault. Sometimes you need a therapist to tell you that it isn't your fault.

The downpour eventually came to a soft trickle, and I resolved to exist with a minuscule leak in my ceiling. I put down a bucket and now it doesn’t quite bother me. I’m not glad that a manosphere-inspired crowd took an opportunity to stomp around and cry Amber Heard (like crying wolf), but I do feel changed. For better or for worse, I’m more combative and head-strong because I had to be throught this odd experience. Unfortunately, instances like these will continue to recur until a systemic disruption halts the existing cycle in its tracks.

Internet regulation is not something I'm sure would help us. I do not trust our leaders to properly care for the Internet space as I don't trust them to care for our faltering physical one. What is very daunting is the idea that we likely need a complete restructure of the Infrastructures that already exist. On Episode 8 of the podcast Doomscroll Josh Citarella goes in-depth about the importance of new spaces and frameworks in the intangible. For anything to shift here, we need people who truly understand the Internet space and have deeply researched the impression that niche communities and subcultures have brushed upon it, and specifically, what their behavior patterns look like and translate to on a grander scale. In the right hands, we could be led to virtual solace.

This comes from rebuilding the system from the ground up. To think about shifting the power or changing something that exists is intimidating in itself. If one individual cannot do this themself (they can't), then what can we do? The answer always comes back to creating an awareness. Of each other (being loving and understanding, forgiving), and of the big guys. The whole ‘rise in consciousness’ solution. Keeping up with people who care, and listening to them. My personal wish is that someone—like Josh or even Laura Bates, author of Men Who Hate Women, or Taylor Lorenz, the journalist who departed from Washington Post to write her own newsletter, User Mag, or Brad Troemel, post-Internet artist who recently created The Cancelled Report to unpack the phenomena of mass online hate—would hold the power in this game. I wish that the system would lie in the hands of the experts who understand what has happened from the creation of this thing until now.

While we can't do anything alone, we have to do what we independently. We can learn, share the strange stories of the internet, and apply those lessons to the closer communities around us until we all finally get the same idea. We can take it upon ourselves to uphold a better internet experience until our audiences are wise enough to understand the psychological implications of, say, placing blame on a single person for the passing of a word-famous pop-star. We can do better than that.