When she married Justin Bieber in a picture-perfect wedding with the words ‘Till Death Do Us Part’ stitched into her veil, Hailey Baldwin was living millions of teenage girls’ wildest dream.
The couple had been together for just six months when the pop superstar, 31, shocked everyone by popping the question with a £750,000 ring while they were holidaying with friends in the Bahamas in 2018.
Just seven years later, however, there has been online speculation that Hailey and Justin Bieber’s marriage appears to be cracking. They are under immense strain handling the backlash to the former child star’s increasingly erratic public outbursts and are simultaneously coping with the pressure of raising their newborn, Jack Blues.
And now they face a fresh concern after a YouTube video has gone viral on the internet after making unsubstantiated claims that Hailey pursued Justin for more than ten years.
It has led to some speculation online over whether their whirlwind romance was as spontaneous as it seemed, or simply a part of a masterplan constructed by Hailey, an alleged ‘superfan’.
The video may be only 20 minutes long, but it appears to be a meticulous deconstruction of Hailey Baldwin’s ‘decade-long obsession’ with Justin Bieber that, the video claims, ran from 2009 to 2019, when they tied the knot.
Allegations range from the the then-teenager orchestrating a ‘bump in’, to allegedly imitating the activities of Justin’s ex-girlfriend, Selena Gomez.
There has been online speculation that Hailey and Justin Bieber’s marriage appears to be cracking
After actress and singer Gomez, who is now engaged to music producer Benny Blanco, made a cooking show for HBO in 2020, Hailey followed suit two years later with a similar ‘at home’ format.
A source told the Daily Mail: ‘There were times when Selena would do something or say something only for Hailey to go and do it less than 24 hours later.’
Selena herself has reportedly been ‘on to Hailey’s game for the past 15 years’, according to a source who told the Mail she ‘was aware of the behaviour when she was dating Justin’.
Our source claims Selena’s friends have found it ‘really disturbing’ to see this ‘all play out in real time’.
The video shows examples of Hailey appearing to copy Gomez ‘word for word’ in interviews which were conducted days apart.
The deep dive has become an internet sensation, attracting millions of views across a wide range of social media platforms but most prolifically on TikTok.
Painting Hailey, daughter of the actor Stephen Baldwin and niece of Alec Baldwin, as ‘the biggest Belieber ever’ – the name given to his devoted fans – the video claims she was ‘lurking in the shadows and using her famous friends and father’s Hollywood connections to snare Justin’.
Accusations of this sort of behaviour first emerged back in 2019 when Dana Rose, an ex-Justin Bieber superfan, posted a video on YouTube in which she claims to have to have messaged online with Hailey about Bieber.
Fans of the singer, who found fame in the late Noughties, were known to have the phone numbers of paparazzi in New York and Los Angeles and would pay them to reveal his location.
Dana Rose ran a Justin Bieber fan account with more than 200,000 followers and had become a niche internet celebrity in her own right thanks to her apparently encyclopaedic knowledge of the whereabouts of the Canadian superstar.
In 2011, Hailey Bieber, then 15, followed Dana Rose on social media and struck up a rapport with her. The starstruck fans would tweet each other about Justin, Dana said, even discussing the most trivial details, such as his height.
Selena Gomez, now engaged to music producer Benny Blanco, made a cooking show for HBO in 2020
… and Hailey followed suit two years later with a similar ‘at home’ format
Screenshots allege that Justin’s future wife tweeted in 2012: ‘He’s no more than 5’8 because I’m 5’7 and a half and we’re literally almost the same height’.
She added in another post: ‘He’ll still grow a good amount’.
As a fan living in New York City, Dana said that put her in a different league of Beliebers because ‘I always knew where he was,’ with Justin spending much time in the city.
The viral video goes on to claim that a young Hailey seems to appear in the background of a number of videos of Justin greeting fans while out and about in New York between 2009 and 2013.
This is particularly strange when you consider that the teenagers had been officially introduced by that time and Justin had been round to Hailey’s house with his parents.
Stephen Baldwin even treated his youngest daughter to a meet-and-greet backstage with the singer when she was just 13.
Footage shows an adolescent Justin, with his trademark flicked fringe, reaching his hand out to shake a shy Hailey’s hand when her father introduces them.
‘She such a huge fan of your music,’ Stephen Baldwin can be heard shouting in Justin’s ear as a starstruck Hailey looks on.
Hailey, accompanied by her father Stephen, got a chance to chat to Justin at the premier of his documentary Never Say Never and the three were pictured together – a shot that has gone down in pop history as the first image of the future husband and wife
However, in an interview with Vogue in 2019 reflecting on their first meeting, Hailey insisted: ‘I was never a superfan of him. I didn’t think about it in any kind of way except for the fact that he was cute. Everybody had a crush on him.’
Despite Hailey allegedly not being interested in Justin at the time, she explained in an interview with the chat show host Jimmy Fallon that, following their introduction, her father Stephen and Justin’s mother, Pattie, ‘kind of just connected as friends’.
She added: ‘We invited them over to our house the next day. So he and his mom just came over for family dinner with me and my family and we went bowling’.
In 2011, Hailey was on the purple carpet at the premiere of his hit musical documentary, Never Say Never, having flown from New York to LA.
Her persistence paid off that very evening when, accompanied by her father Stephen, she got a chance to chat to Justin and the three were even pictured together – a shot that has gone down in pop history as the first of the future husband and wife.
There was only one snag. At that time, Justin was still dating Selena Gomez. It was a relationship that had captivated his millions of female fans across the globe, who affectionately dubbed them, ‘Jelena’.
Four months later, when Justin travelled to New York to support Selena at the premiere of her new movie Monte Carlo, Hailey was there as a guest.
Hailey was photographed on the red carpet at the premiere of Selena Gomez’s new movie Monte Carlo, holding a copy of a glossy magazine that had ‘Jelena’ beaming together on the cover
In a move that comes across as distinctly weird in hindsight, she was photographed on the red carpet holding a copy of a glossy magazine that had ‘Jelena’ beaming together on the cover.
Despite their budding friendship, a year later Hailey can be seen in the background as a crowd of screaming girls give it their all at Justin’s Toyota Concert Series at the Rockefeller Plaza.
As the singer reaches over barriers to touch his fans’ hands, his future wife does not come forward, maintaining her dignity as a bystander rather than a besotted Belieber.
As time went on, the strain of coping with a high-profile relationship and escalating fame was beginning to take its toll on Bieber. By 2014, the 19-year-old sank into a deep depression, which only worsened as the year wore on and led him to start dabbling in drugs.
Reflecting on this time, he once said: ‘My security was coming into the room at night to check my pulse. People don’t know how serious it got. I had a lot of money and a lot of things, so you have all these people around me hanging on and wanting stuff from me, knowing I was living this lifestyle that they also wanted to live’.
He and Selena broke up that same year and Hailey, who had done some modelling jobs for the likes of Topshop by that time, wasted no time moving in.
Despite Hailey allegedly not being interested in Justin at the time, she explained in an interview with the chat show host Jimmy Fallon that, following their introduction, her father Stephen and Justin’s mother, Pattie, ‘kind of just connected as friends’
She had spent the previous three years growing ever more friendly with the Jenner sisters after appearing in a music video for the teen heartthrob, Cody Simpson.
Kendall and Kylie, also child stars after finding fame on Keeping Up With The Kardashians through their older sister Kim, ran in the same circles as Justin and were close to him.
And so when Hailey and Justin reunited in person for the first time in several years in April 2014, it was as friends rather than fan and superstar, and they were spotted having dinner with Kendall, now 29.
Having graduated from ‘fan’ status, Hailey took her budding relationship with Justin a step further eight months later when they started attending church together.
Soon they were going to lunch and posting each other on their social media – the nature of their relationship had finally changed.
They had their first kiss when Justin invited Hailey out for sushi and a movie in November of 2014.
Several weeks later, Justin attended her 18th birthday party but, after rumours began circulating that the pair were dating, he was keen to shut them down and posted on his Instagram: ‘People are crazy. I’m super single and this is my good friend u would know otherwise’.
Hailey didn’t appear to see things that way. When reports emerged that Justin had ‘hooked up’ with the singer Halsey at the American Music Awards in 2015, Hailey posted a video of herself on social media looking dejected in the back of a taxi and asking the driver to change the channel when a Halsey song came on.
As the singer reaches over barriers to touch his fans’ hands, his future wife does not come forward, maintaining her dignity as a bystander rather than a besotted Belieber
Justin appears to have dated both Selena and Hailey – at separate points – on and off throughout 2016, leaving fans unsure about exactly what was going on.
At this point the video alleges: ‘She appears to have developed an insatiable need to copy her love rival’. When Selena got a lowercase ‘g’ tattooed behind her left ear, Hailey got an almost identical tattoo in the exact same spot just 12 days later.
While Selena said hers was a tribute to her younger sister, Gracie, the highly religious Hailey said her ‘g’ was for Georgia, the daughter of Chad Veach, the pastor of Zoe Church, the renowned Hillsong megachurch in Los Angeles of which Selena, Justin and Hailey are all members.
Fans have also compiled a dossier of examples of Hailey wearing the same outfits and jewellery as the Emilia Perez actress and posing just like her days or months apart.
In 2018, Justin and Selena briefly got back together but it didn’t last and, only six months after they were seen together for a final time, he said ‘I do’ to Hailey.
And Hailey’s alleged copying appears to have continued well after she and Justin tied the knot.
In 2020, Hailey got another tattoo with a ‘J’ and star on her ring finger to honour their nuptials. But eagle-eyed fans noticed the font and style bore a striking resemblance to the ‘J’ ring Justin had bought Selena eight years earlier when they were together and he is rumoured to have proposed to her.
Internet sleuths uncovered more instances of alleged copying when Hailey took to giving interviews in which she repeated a number of Selena’s responses ‘word for word’.
One example cited by the YouTube series relates to an interview Selena gave to The Ellen Show on January 24, 2020: ‘I realised that everybody else seemed to be narrating my life from me, so why don’t I put something out that is my side of the story’.
Then, 36 days later, Hailey appeared on Tonight with Jimmy Fallon and said: ‘I realised that I was able to tell my story about who I was from my own mouth, rather than people from the outside being able to tell my story for me’.
The video concludes by claiming: ‘Hailey spent nine years getting to know Justin through a meticulously orchestrated [campaign], building connections with people and [putting] herself around Justin as much as possible.’
In 2022, Selena and Hailey made an attempt to put their issues to rest when they posed for a photo together and chatted at a gala for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. A source told the CBS TV show Entertainment Tonight their decision to be photographed was to show the public ‘there’s no beef or bad feelings’.
‘This used to affect [Selena] deeply until she stopped caring,’ an insider told the Mail, adding that the Grammy winner is able to ‘laugh’ at the supposed drama now.
