Kate Cassidy has broken her silence on her final days with Liam Payne in her first interview since the singer’s death.
The former One Direction star died at the age of 31 after falling from the third-floor balcony of the Casa Sur Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 16 October 2024.
Two days before Payne’s death, his girlfriend, Cassidy, travelled back to her home in Miami, Florida. This led to much speculation that the pair had broken up after two years of dating.
In her new interview with The Sun, the 25-year-old explained her reasons for leaving Argentina and revealed the moment she found out about the singer’s death.
Kate Cassidy and Liam Payne began dating in 2022 (Ricky Vigil M/Justin E Palmer/GC Images)
The influencer said the pair had a ‘fairytale romance’ and that she supported him ‘through thick and thin’ as she planned to marry him.
“Love is so optimistic, and you just hope that everything will work out at the end. Obviously if I knew, if I could see into the future, I would never have left Argentina,” Cassidy told the outlet.
She explained that the plan had originally been to go there for ‘about a week’.
“After two weeks, I had a responsibility, we had a responsibility, we had our dog,” she added.
Having described Payne as her ‘charming soulmate’, Cassidy said: “I never thought this would’ve happened.”
But on that day in October, she was scrolling through TikTok at home with their dog, Nala, when one of the singer’s friends called her.
“I didn’t believe it at first. I thought it was just a rumour. Or something that somebody made up just to get views. Then instantly I just had a bad feeling in my gut. I was like, ‘Why would somebody make this up? Is this true?’” Cassidy recalled.
Cassidy left Argentina without Payne (Instagram/@kateecass)
“And I feel like I just completely blacked out. When I officially found the news out to be true, I felt numb. I tried to call him. I called pretty much everybody.”
Heartbreakingly, she added that their pup thought she was ‘trying to play’ as Cassidy kept ‘pacing around the house’ and didn’t ‘sleep at all’ that night.
The influencer said it ‘still doesn’t feel fully real’ that Payne is no longer here as she thinks about him ‘every second of every day’.
“That he won’t be there with me to navigate through this life, that I’ll have to deal with this without him by my side… it’s really hard,” Cassidy added.
“You don’t think about the worst possible thing that can happen.”
With five people charged in connection to Payne’s death, a UK inquest confirmed his medical cause of death as ‘polytrauma’.
Featured Image Credit: Instagram/Kateecass
