How Maya Henry's account of her relationship with Liam Payne sheds new light on the star's 'intimate encounter' with the male waiter accused of supplying him drugs - and the things I found out about his final days: FRED KELLY

‘I stood by him in his darkest moments, through the chaos, through the pain,’ revealed Maya Henry yesterday of her ex-fiance Liam Payne: ‘And yet, when it was all over, I was left with nothing but emptiness.’

Almost five months on from the One Direction singer’s fatal fall from a third-floor balcony in Buenos Aires, the 23-year-old Texan model has spoken out about her tumultuous three-year relationship with the star which lasted from 2019 to 2022.

‘On drugs, he became someone unrecognisable — so different from his sober self,’ Henry, who was engaged to Payne for two years, told Rolling Stone magazine. ‘No matter how much I tried to save him, I was drowning in the process.’

In the report, Rolling Stone also refers to unnamed sources who allege the singer once pushed Henry down a flight of stairs, chased her with an axe and issued her with an ultimatum that led to her having an abortion.

Many of these revelations were first detailed in a novel entitled Looking Forward published by Henry last year, which revolves around a young girl’s troubled romance with a pop star, and is now understood to be based almost entirely on fact.

There is no doubt that Henry’s account is deeply upsetting. But what has shaken me more than anything else are the terrifying parallels between the erratic behaviour she recalls from three years ago and what I knew of Liam’s behaviour in the days leading up to his death.

For while reporting on the incident from Buenos Aires last year, a close friend of Liam’s then girlfriend, Kate Cassidy, told me that Kate had been experiencing problems with Liam’s drug taking.

Three days before Payne died, 25-year-old Cassidy flew home to Florida alone. Payne remained in Argentina awaiting the renewal of his American visa.

‘I hate staying in one place for too long,’ Cassidy said at the time, justifying her actions in a TikTok video. ‘We were supposed to be there for like five days and it turned into two weeks and I was like: I need to go home.’

Cassidy also last week told the Sun newspaper: ‘I had a responsibility, we had a responsibility. We had our dog.’

My source, however, is unconvinced: ‘I just hope Maya speaking out helps Kate to do the same.’

They believe that living with an addict simply took its toll on Kate. Maya is clearly still dwelling on this and Kate will be too. The girls might be rivals, but they have more in common than they realise.

Rolling Stone’s cover story contains a number of other revelations about Payne’s challenging final years, including the claim that he ‘struggled with his sexuality’, with one source alleging that ‘during his relationship with Maya, he sexted men.’ Shockingly, she discovered this when, according to the source, Payne ’accidentally broadcast… them to their TV’.

This sheds a possible new light on Liam’s relationship with the Argentine waiter Braian Nahuel Paiz, a man he met just weeks before his death and who is now being held on remand accused of supplying the singer with drugs - a charge he denies.

Paiz admitted to spending two separate nights with the Strip That Down singer and, in an interview with Argentine TV shortly after Payne’s death, revealed of their second rendezvous - on October 13, three days before Payne’s death - ‘We spent the night together, we consumed drugs because the truth is that something intimate happened.’

Paiz never elaborated on the nature of the ‘intimate’ encounter, except to claim via a since deleted Instagram post: ‘I never said I had sex with anyone.’

When I visited Berazategui, the working-class district several miles south of the city centre, where Paiz was brought up, last year, a childhood friend of the now disgraced aspiring model told me that he was ‘fascinated by the idea of celebrity’.

The suggestion that Payne was actively courting other men during his relationship with Maya Henry raises new questions about the nature of the relationship between the singer and the waiter who so desperately craved fame and recognition.

Just two months before Payne’s death, Maya Henry posted a video to her 650,000 TikTok followers in which she accused the singer of harassing her long after their separation.

Her latest heartbreaking allegations paint an ever more desperate picture of quite how troubled the star’s life had become following the break-up of One Direction in 2016.

This Sunday will mark exactly five months since Liam died in Argentina. The shadow left by his death, however, seems to grow longer by the day, as those who once shared his life shine fresh light on the man behind the celebrity.