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 that runs in a lone streak down his cheek doesn’t leave any unsightly stains or bloodshot eyes, but Justin Bieber would have known the furor it would cause.

And sure enough, after he uploaded two selfies of himself crying to his 292 million Instagram followers last weekend, pandemonium ensued.

Was the pop star suffering from another mental health crisis? After all, his past battles with everything from drug and sex addiction to low self-esteem have been well documented since he rose to fame as a teenager.

Or was he hinting at trouble in his five-year marriage to Hailey Baldwin Bieber, 27, a socialite, top model and devout Christian who is credited not only with helping Justin recover from the excesses of fame but also with keeping his religious faith? ?

The couple has always made it clear that their marriage is no picnic — or, as Hailey put it in 2019, “very difficult” — and rumors of a rift circulated online after Hailey was pictured without Justin at a pre-Oscars party in February .

Although gossip sites reported she had moved out of the couple’s £20million Beverly Hills mansion and spotted her without a 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. But underneath those Instagram photos of her visibly upset husband, Hailey wrote that Justin was “a beautiful cryer,” with a laughing cry emoji that some took as mocking.

So what is the truth behind that tear? And is Justin so worried that even his loving wife can’t save him?

Given the level of fame the singer has lived in for nearly three decades, it is perhaps inevitable that his mental health has suffered.

Raised in poverty in Ontario, Canada, by his single mother, Pattie Mallette, who he said sometimes suffered from depression (his largely absent father Jeremy, he added, “has anger issues”), the singer found himself at 13 age-old fame after future manager Scooter Braun found videos of him performing at a local singing competition that his mother had uploaded to YouTube.

By the time he was 16, hits like One Time and One Less Lonely Girl turned him into what Justin describes as a “manufactured” star.

Hailey’s privileged upbringing, meanwhile, was a world away from Justin’s. Hailey, one of two sisters, was homeschooled in New York by her devout 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 were instilled in me by the way I was raised,” Hailey has said.

She seemed stunned when she first met Justin backstage during his appearance on America’s Today show in 2009. He was 15, she was 12. She had gotten tickets to the show from her uncle Alec.

“Everyone was in love with him,” Hailey said later. “But for the first few years we had a weird age gap.”

Of course, despite his heartthrob status and an army of fans dubbed “Beliebers,” Justin, who started smoking marijuana at “12 or 13,” was still youthfully vulnerable. Last month, images surfaced 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 looking for girls.

“Right now, Justin has 48 hours with Diddy, him and his son,” Combs said. “They’re having the time of their lives, like where we hang out and what we do, we can’t really reveal. But it’s definitely a fifteen-year-old’s dream.” They will, he says, “go completely crazy.”

As Justin’s fame grew, his life fell apart, unchecked by boundaries and buffeted by the adoration of his millions of young fans. At 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 “frightening” time, describing drugs as “a narcotic that you just have to get through.”

He took “everything,” from alcohol to the tranquilizer Xanax, MDMA and mushrooms, to the extent that his staff checked his pulse at night. “People don’t know how serious it has become,” he said. “I woke up in the morning and the first thing I did was take pills, smoke a blunt and start my day. It just got scary.”

In 2013, his behavior became increasingly erratic. The then 19-year-old was accused of throwing eggs at his neighbor’s house in an LA celebrity enclave (a lawsuit was settled in 2015); he was depicted leaving a brothel in Brazil and leaving his capuchin monkey in Germany. The following year he was arrested in Miami for driving his Lamborghini under the influence.

He was contrite, describing his antics as “shit,” and somehow managed to keep his adoring fans — and his on-off girlfriend from 2011-2018, actress Selena Gomez — on side.

Then, in 2014, at the height of his volatility, Justin did something completely unexpected: he found God.

Hailey recalled, “One day Justin walked into Hillsong [Church in New York] and said, “Hey, you’ve gotten older.” I was like, ‘Yeah, what’s going on?’ Over time, he became my best friend.” Meanwhile, Hillsong head Carl Lentz persuaded Justin to move to his New Jersey home for an ‘informal detox’, where the pair played basketball and hockey for several weeks – after which Justin says he stopped using drugs.

“I’m really proud of him,” Hailey told Vogue in 2019. ‘To keep it up without a sober coach or AA or lessons. I think it’s extraordinary. He’s a walking miracle in a way.”

It seems that Justin had found a sense of belonging in religion 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, saying he needed to address his “legitimate problem with sex,” which, he said, “was a lot can cause. of pain’.

The “common denominator” in their reconciliation “has always been the church,” Hailey said, while Justin described getting married as his “calling” and something he was “forced” to do.

He proposed in the Bahamas the following month and hinted to Vogue that they only had sex after their low-key civil ceremony in New York in September.

Still, marriage hasn’t been the panacea Justin had hoped for. As he put it himself: ‘The first year of marriage was very difficult.’

He was seen crying in a car with Hailey and said he “had a little emotional breakdown because I thought marriage would solve all my problems, but it didn’t.”

Hailey didn’t sound like she was really 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 will always be difficult.

“You don’t wake up every day and say, ‘I’m so in love and you’re perfect.’ That’s not what being married is.” Marriage was, she continued, “about wanting to fight for something.”

Fighting each other was “good,” Justin added, suggesting the couple was too afraid of saying “the wrong thing” to express themselves, “and it was very hard to [Hailey] to say what she feels.”

Of course, millions in the bank have softened some of the emotional blows. In 2023, the Biebers purchased their Beverly Hills mansion, 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 have both longed for – will require “a whole new season of navigating,” says Hailey, not least because her modeling 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 also plans to act. “I would love to be a Bond girl,” she has said.

Justin, meanwhile, hasn’t released an album since 2021’s Justice, and still seems to be searching for elusive peace.

A friend speculates that after Justin’s meteoric rise to fame, “standard levels of dopamine just don’t get you excited anymore.” Others speculate that his broken upbringing is to blame.

Although Justin has praised his wife for “walking hand in hand with me while continuing to keep my emotions, mind, body and soul intact.” [sic]!’, it makes you wonder how much longer she wants to do that – and whether the cracks in his five-year marriage are the real factor behind this week’s tears.