During an interview with NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Sunday, actress and pop singer Selena Gomez said she suffered “certain abuse” during her years-long, on-again-off-again relationship with fellow famed singer Justin Bieber.
Discussing her recent hit song “Lose You To Love Me,” Gomez alluded to her relationship with Bieber.
“It has a different meaning to me now from when I wrote it,” she told NPR. “I felt I didn’t get a respectful closure, and I had accepted that, but I know I needed some way to just say a few things that I wish I had said. It’s not a hateful song; it’s a song that is saying — I had something beautiful and I would never deny that it wasn’t that. It was very difficult and I’m happy it’s over. And I felt like this was a great way to just say, you know, it’s done, and I understand that, and I respect that, and now here I am stepping into a whole other chapter.”
Garcia-Navarro asked if Gomez was speaking of Bieber. “You had to get the name in, I get it,” the 27-year-old responded.
“I’ve found the strength in it,” Gomez explained. “It’s dangerous to stay in a victim mentality. And I’m not being disrespectful, I do feel I was a victim to certain abuse.”
“You mean emotional abuse?” pressed Garcia-Navarro.
“Yes, and I think that it’s something that — I had to find a way to understand it as an adult,” the “Back To You” singer answered. “And I had to understand the choices I was making.”
“As much as I definitely don’t want to spend the rest of my life talking about this, I am really proud that I can say I feel the strongest I’ve ever felt and I’ve found a way to just walk through it with as much grace as possible,” added Gomez.
Bieber, who is now married to Hailey Baldwin, has not yet responded Gomez’ comments.
On Monday, the 25-year-old made an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and discussed being faithful to Baldwin.
“’Be faithful? That’s a huge … am I able to do that?’” Bieber said he asked himself. “So, I think that’s really what I was battling with. I finally was like, ‘I’m going to make the decision and follow through with it and be a husband. This is what I always wanted. I’m going to choose this woman and just do it.”
As noted by The Daily Wire, “Bieber and his wife Hailey have been rather open about taking the marital covenant seriously — so much so that they refrained from pre-marital sex for a year.”
In recent years, Gomez has opened up about struggling with anxiety, gone through two public breakups, and had a kidney transplant.
“The reason why I’ve become so vocal about the trials and tribulations of my life is because people were already going to narrate that for me,” she told NPR, adding, “I want to be able to tell my story the way that I want to tell it. And all of these things happened, and I wasn’t going to deny that, I wasn’t going to pretend to put a smile on when it actually was awful — a few of the worst moments of my life. And I don’t know if I would have made it. And that’s medical reasons, obviously, and emotional reasons. I just had to find a way to claim my story.”