Hailey Bieber publicly thanked Selena Gomez for defending her on Instagram Friday morning, March 24, and urging her fans to treat everyone with kindness. “I want to thank Selena for speaking out, as her and I have been discussing the lasts few weeks how to move past this ongoing narrative between her and I,” the 26-year-old model wrote on her Instagram Story. “The last few weeks have been very hard for everyone involved and millions of people are seeing so much hate around this which is extremely harmful. While social media is an incredible way to connect and build community, moments like this only create extreme division instead of bringing people together.”
“Things can always be taken out of context or construed differently than they were intended,” Hailey continued. “We all need to be more thoughtful about what we post and what we say, including myself. In the end, I believe love will always be bigger than hate and negativity, and there is always an opportunity to meet each other with more empathy and compassion.”
Friday morning, Selena, 30, posted a statement to her Instagram Story to address the online drama regarding her and Hailey’s relationship and the narratives fans create around it. “Hailey Bieber reached out to me and let me know that she has been receiving death threats and such hateful negativity. This isn’t what I stand for. No one should have to experience hate or bullying. I’ve always advocated for kindness and really want this all to stop,” she wrote with a red heart emoji.
Selena and Hailey’s relationship has been questioned for years following their years-long love triangle with Justin Bieber that ultimately ended when Hailey married the Canadian singer in Sept. 2018. Fans have raised their eyebrows at some of Hailey and her friends’ social media posts recently because they believe they were mocking Selena. The latest incident occurred when Hailey and Kylie Jenner were on a FaceTime call and seemingly examining each other’s eyebrows last month. Kylie posted a screenshot of their call just hours after Selena made fun of her own eyebrows on TikTok and said she accidentally over-laminated them. Kylie also shared a selfie with the phrase, “this was an accident???” written directly over her eyebrows.
The resulting conversation and hateful narrative raised by fans caused Selena to take a break from social media just one month after she ended her four-year social media hiatus. “I’m gonna be taking a second from social media ’cause this is a little silly,” she told fans in a Feb. 23 Instagram Live session. “And I’m 30. I’m too old for this, so. But I love you guys so much!” She concluded, “I will see you guys sooner than later. I just, I’m gonna just take a break from everything.”
As noted above, Hailey and Selena have been aware of the narrative between them for years, and attempted to prove there is no bad blood between them at the end of 2022. The Rhode Beauty founder spoke about their relationship during a Sept. 2022 interview with the Call Her Daddy podcast. “It’s all respect. It’s all love,” she said. “That’s also why I feel like, well, if everybody on our side knows what happened and we’re good and we can walk away from it with clarity and respect, then that’s fine! That brought me a lot of peace. WE know what happened. It is what it is. You’re never going to be able to correct every narrative.”
The following month, they nearly broke the internet by posing together at the Academy Museum‘s Gala in Los Angeles on Saturday, Oct. 15, 2022.