Justin Bieber hates his wife (and that should scare us all)
The rise in deeply misogynistic and abusive celebrity relationships is no coincidence, and we trivialize them to the detriment of the cause
Justin Bieber is currently trending on tiktok once again. Why? Because he has once again been doing emotionally abusive things to his wife. Write me shocked *not*.
For years, videos have been circulating at least quarterly of him humiliating and abusing Hailey in broad daylight, from slamming car doors on her, to pushing her away and dismissing her when she tries to talk to him, to posting publicly on instagram about how he doesn’t support her career. He has actively spoken about how he felt forced to marry Hailey, calling it an “arranged” marriage, and has given us reason after reason to assume that he’s not happy with Hailey. And this week he’s back at it.
On Hailey’s 29th birthday, not only did he not attend her party, but instead he hosted a live stream during the party, and sang an unreleased song from his last album that included the lyric, “I’m stuck up in a relationship that isn’t you.” He even, allegedly, whispered Selena’s name mid vocals. This tomfoolery also came right after the couple’s attendance at the GQ Man of the Year event, during which Justin was seen getting out of his SUV with a couple of friends and running into the event, leaving Hailey behind to climb through to the front seat in a dress by herself with minimal security and enter alone. So yeah, it’s no surprise that Justin didn’t win man of the year.
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While at first this whole Hailey-Justin situation this might seem like it can be reduced to them being slightly unhinged celebrities with a humiliation kink, if we strip back the layers, they don’t seem to be that dissimilar to many toxic and abusive couples, celebrities or not. I think many of us have had a friend in a toxic relationship like this one, or perhaps have been the friend in the relationship. They seem to have all the qualities of a classic toxic relationship, just on steroids:
One person puts the other on a pedestal, and works hard to ‘get them’ and ‘keep them’, often ignoring signs that the partner isn’t treating them well and has a history of abuse.
This is certainly the case here, as there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Hailey stalked or at least followed Justin around for years before they were actually together (yes, I fear I have watched THE Hailey stalker video…I’ve earned my PhD in pop culture ;). And while the timeline is a bit blurry, it seems that Hailey’s relationship with Justin began after he split from Selena, who had at that point openly talked about how her relationship with Justin was deeply toxic and emotionally abusive, a fact which it appears Hailey ignored.
Once in a relationship, the partner’s engage in the classic abuse cycle, in which affection is withheld and only rewarded under certain circumstances or after abuse as a form of manipulation. This also often involves the ‘I love you’/’I hate you’ pattern.
Hailey and Justin seem to quickly swing between these highs and lows, with Hailey one minute going out without her wedding ring, and the next posting on instagram with Justin. Every time I think Hailey might just pack it in, she comes back with a post defending this man. And Justin is the same: he’ll sing his wife’s praises in a song on the album, and then literally a month later pull a stunt like this recent birthday debacle. Sometimes I myself feel gaslit by the flip flopping so god knows what it’s like to be in the relationship.
The partner who is facing more of the abuse continually makes excuses for the other, sometimes even protecting the partner in spite of the abuse they are receiving.
Hailey recently bailed out Justin from his debt by selling her cosmetics company, Rhode, for 1 billion dollars. At the time of the sale, many in the industry were confused: it seemed like an odd move for someone with a relatively new company that was performing really well. And moreover, Hailey had said that she loved the brand, and enjoyed doing her work with the cosmetics company. It seemed fishy, and when reports came out that the pair was struggling financially, Justin’s sudden return to music and Hailey’s sale of her company made much more sense. Hailey literally made a major sacrifice to bail out a man who cared so little about her career that he wore sweatpants and crocs to one of her company launch events.
So sure, we might not be stalking our future partner at expensive hotels and bailing them out of billions of dollars in debt, but the same patterns apply.
Now, apart from offering an interesting analysis of the patterns in toxic relationships across social identities, the Hailey-Justin case also offers an important look into the current public perception of abuse against women. The discourse that has circulated regarding this latest iteration of Justin’s emotional abuse has been startling.
As someone who has closely followed the response to Justin’s behaviour over the years (often against my will, as I had an ex who was a massive Justin stan…yes, I should’ve seen that as a red flag) I feel that the current conversation on social media and elsewhere about Justin has felt much less, shall I say, harsh. In the past, following one of his outbursts, video compilations of his past transgressions would begin circulating the internet. There would be an onslaught of ‘he’s not a good guy’ videos, and reddit threads about his behaviour would be resurrected.
This time however, I’ve seen far fewer videos on socials, and the one’s that I have seen have focused even more disproportionately on Hailey and Selena than they usually do. Of course, the discourse has always pitted these two women against one another, and leant into the narrative that both are “crazy” and “jealous.” Classic misogynistic fodder. However this time, these comments and takes are truly dominating the conversation. The ‘jelena’ stans have been in full force, in spite of Selena having recently gotten married and having talked openly about how she faced emotional abuse from Justin—which Justin has also openly admitted to. I’ve also seen many videos analyzing Hailey’s psyche and why she would stay with this man, without any call out of his egregious behaviour. And I’ve also seen far more videos than normal defending him, with zoom ins on blurry photos as evidence that he actually was at her birthday party, claims that since it was a Rhode event he shouldn’t have had to have been there, or even claims that he left her in the back of the car alone with minimal security because he wanted her to have her moment (girl, what?).
This discourse about abuse that trivializes and dismisses it, and which leans into the ‘blame the woman’ narrative has been, based on my observation, far more apparent overall in pop culture over the past several months. Indeed, the celebrity culture conversation seems to have undergone a shift towards the increased normalization of abuse.
A prime example of this was Kristen Bell’s infamous instagram post from last month. In it, she ‘joked’ about her husband, Dax threatening to kill her (I have a whole video on this post), and featured a picture of her and her husband in which she appears child-like.
While the post did indeed cause a stir, with many calling out the trivialization of domestic violence—which was especially significant given that she posted this during Domestic Violence Awareness Month in the US—there was also a disturbing proportion of folks who defended the post, saying that critics were ‘too woke’, and other comments of the like. Even major podcasts that cover dating and relationships, like U Up? podcast by Betches Media claimed that anyone calling out Kristen was just “taking the fun out of it.”
And while Kristen of course deserved to be called out for this, the part that alarmed me the most however was that I saw next to no conversation about Dax himself. Everyone was calling out Kristen for having repeated what her husband said to her, not to Dax for having said it. And as
discussed so excellently in their post on the matter, Dax is a man with a pretty freaky podcast in which he often discusses his substance abuse issues and routinely mansplains to women…not exactly someone who I’d personally want to give the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his treatment of Kristen.In another high profile example, on this season of Selling Sunset—the most watched show on Netflix, a new season of which aired recently—one of the top story lines was Emma Hernan’s toxic relationship with her ultra-rich boyfriend. Several of Emma’s own cast members and those who were closest to her, including Chrishell and Chelsea, felt that Emma’s relationship was “abusive and manipulative”, and called this out explicitly at the reunion. In spite of this, however, other cast members such as Mary, trivialized the matter and blamed Chrishell and Chelsea for even bringing up the abuse, saying that “we all go through toxic relationships” and that bringing it up was just “embarrassing to Emma.”
The online discourse has abounded with anti-Chrishell and anti-Chelsea hate, in part because of their identities as queer and black women respectively, but also because of their calling out of Emma’s toxic boyfriend’s behaviour. I’ve seen more posts than I can count of people calling Chrishell a ‘mean-girl’ for telling Emma that she’s in a toxic cycle and removing herself from the friendship, and almost zero criticism of the boyfriend himself, who is the reason for all of this in the first place. And this is a man who has been openly homophobic, misogynistic, literally violent towards Emma in tiktok vidoes, and racist.
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And I could go on. There was Kim K’s recent appearance on Call Her Daddy podcast after which she was received backlash for supposedly ‘exaggerating’ her ex Kanye’s behaviour, or Megan Fox who has received criticism for speaking out against her ex MGK’s abuse, with many saying that she ‘brought the abuse on herself.’ There are so many examples of the growing normalization of intimate partner violence and violence against women in the celebrity world right now.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that we’re seeing more and more of this discourse right now. We are currently in a time of rising fascism and right-wingism, not to mention a key moment in the Epstein case, with important debates about the heavy redacting that has been done to the files. As we know, celebrity culture both reflects society and is a reflection of society. So with the global rise in violence against women and the constant messaging that speaking out about it will result in minimal to no consequences for the perpetrator, it stands to reason that pop culture discourse wouldn’t exactly be kind to women or reflect the true gravity of the issue.
Ultimately, the treatment of celebrity women by their partners and the discourse surrounding this treatment should scare us all, as it acts as a reflection of the current time.
We know that children, youth, and adults alike are deeply impacted by pop culture and the values it espouses, so what does it say when abuse is being normalized by and for the most visible women of 2025? If Hailey Bieber, with all her financial and personal resources remains in a seemingly emotionally abusive relationship, and is being blamed for it by the public, what about women who don’t have the same luxuries? Women who are tied to their partner financially. What impact would seeing this messaging have on their psyche?
If we want to fight for women’s rights, we can’t ignore the way in which violence against women is portrayed and spoken about in pop culture. We trivialize the Justin and Hailey situation to our own detriment.
I mostly skimmed this, but why in 2025 are people still obsessively keeping track of celebrities? They’ve been an absolute trainwreck as a group for all of hollywood history. I agree that they are important (since people are paying attention to them), but it has mystified me since I was a little kid why anyone takes them very seriously unless they are Very Good or something. I loved reading about Eydie Gorme and her husband Steve Lawrence, for example. The entire industry of music and acting is drenched in madness.
I think there is nuance to the Dax and Kristen thing. He grew up in an abusive home which does give you a somewhat dark sense of humour (I grew up in an abusive home, and would probably have found it funny if he'd said that to me in a jokey way, if that was our established dynamic, and there was no pattern of actual abuse.) Of course, if there's evidence that he's actually abusive, that's a different thing. I don't know enough about them as a couple to comment on that.
The situation with the Beibers, though, is seriously disturbing. She's essentially cut herself off from her family from what I've read, despite them being close before, and if this is what we're seeing in a public forum, how on earth is he treating her behind closed doors?