Sharon Osbourne Honors Liam Payne While Lamenting That Music Industry ‘Let You Down’

Sharon Osbourne has had an inside angle on the highs and lows of the music industry for more than 45 years as her husband Ozzy’s manager. On Thursday (Oct. 17), she took aim at the music biz for what she said was its failure to support former One Direction singer and solo star Liam Payne, who died at 31 on Wednesday following a fatal fall from the balcony of his Buenos Aires, Argentina hotel room.

“Liam, my heart aches. We all let you down,” wrote Osbourne, a three-season veteran of the British X-Factor, where Payne rose to stardom after he was grouped with Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson in 2010. “Where was this industry when you needed them?” she asked in an Instagram post featuring a solemn picture of the late singer who first auditioned for the reality singing show in 2008 as a solo act, before giving it another shot two years later at age 16. “You were just a kid when you entered one of the toughest industries in the world. Who was in your corner? Rest in peace my friend,” said Osbourne, who left X-Factor several years before Payne auditioned.

Payne often talked about the overwhelming pressures he faced when 1D rocketed to global superstardom in 2012, which included suicidal thoughts and substance use, telling the BBC in 2017 that he often used alcohol to “mask” his feelings. I was very confused about fame when it all happened… and learning to be a person outside of your job was difficult,” he said at the time.

Fellow boy bander-turned-solo-star Robbie Williams weighed in as well on Thursday, expressing, “shock, sadness and confusion” about Payne’s death, while urging fans to think deeply about how they treat celebrities online and urging kindness and compassion. “I met the boys on The X Factor and ‘mentored’ them. I use the word mentored in inverted brackets cos I hardly did anything to be honest. I just hung out with them,” wrote Williams, who chronicled his tumultuous years in the spotlight as a member of British boy band Take That and his personal struggles with depression and substance use in the years after in his solo career in a self-titled 2023 Netflix documentary series.

“They were all cheeky and lovely,” Williams wrote. “I enjoyed the light hearted piss takery and Thought about all the times I was that cheeky pisstaker with the Popstars that had gone before me when I was in Take That.”

Williams said he crossed paths with the 1D stars over the years since and while saying he was “fond” of all of them, adding that what Payne’s “trials and tribulations were very similar to mine, so it made sense to reach out to offer what I could. So i did.” He also included what appeared to be a text exchange with Payne from 2022 in which Williams told the singer he was “very proud” of him, to which Payne replied, “that’s man, that means the world.”

The note from Williams included an all-caps section in which the singer reminded fans that we “don’t know what’s going on in people’s lives. What pain they’re going through and what makes them behave in the way that they behave. Before we reach to judgement, a bit of slack needs to be given… Even if you don’t really think that celebrities or their families exist, they f–king do.”

Williams lamented that the “media will unfortunately carry on being the media and fame will carry on being fame.” He ended with a plea for compassion and love, writing, “As individuals though we have the power to change ourselves. We can be kinder. We can be more empathic. We can at least try to be more compassionate towards ourselves, our family, our friends, strangers in life and strangers on the internet. Even famous strangers need your compassion. What a Handsome Talented boy. What a tragic painful loss for his friends, family, fans and by the looks of the energy this moment has created – The World.”

A preliminary autopsy said that Payne died from multiple traumas and internal and external hemorrhages sustained from the impact of a fall from the third-story of the Casa Sur hotel in the Palermo district in Argentina. Police are still investigating the incident, but initial reports are that they found substances in the star’s disheveled room that appeared to be narcotics and alcohol.

Osbourne and Williams’ tributes came after all four of Payne’s former 1D bandmates — Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson and Niall Horan — issued a joint statement mourning the loss of their brother, saying “the memories we shared with him will be treasured forever.” All four living members also offered up their own personal statements, as did Payne’s family and his former school.

See Osbourne and Williams’ tributes below.