Former One Direction member Liam Payne dead at 31 after falling from balcony

Former One Direction member Liam Payne has died. He was 31.

The UK-born singer-songwriter fell from the third floor of his hotel room at CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, according to local officials, per the Associated Press.

Buenos Aires police said in a statement that Payne’s fall resulted in “extremely serious injuries,” with medics confirming his death on the spot.

Pablo Policicchio, the spokesperson for the Security Ministry of Buenos Aires municipality, told the outlet that the musician “had thrown himself from the balcony of his room.”

Policicchio said cops were dispatched to the hotel in response to an emergency call about an “aggressive man who could be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”

Arriving police said they heard a thud and found Payne’s body in the hotel courtyard, Policicchio said.

Several witnesses at CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires, where Payne was staying, told TMZ that he fell from his balcony.

It’s unclear whether the fall was intentional or accidental, and reps for the musician did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.

TMZ obtained a photo showing Payne’s body lying on the hotel’s wooden deck, surrounded by tables and chairs.

The outlet did not publish the image in its entirely, but the tattoos on the man’s arm match Payne’s.

Witnesses told TMZ this happened shortly after 5 p.m. local time and that the pop star had been acting erratically in the hotel lobby earlier.

He reportedly smashed his laptop and had to be carried back to his room.

Payne had attended his former One Direction bandmate Niall Horan’s Buenos Aires concert at the Movistar Arena on Oct. 2.

The late star previously revealed that he had hit “rock bottom” during his time in One Direction due to his use of drugs and alcohol.

“I was worried how far my rock bottom was going to be. Where’s rock bottom for me? And you would never have seen it. I’m very good at hiding it. No one would ever have seen it,” Payne explained on the “Diary of a CEO” podcast in June 2021.

When host Stephen Bartlett asked his guest whether he had ever experienced “suicidal ideation” during his dark days, the “Strip That Down” hitmaker admitted, “Yeah. There is some stuff that I have definitely never, never spoken about.”

He continued, “It was really, really, really severe. It was a problem. And it was only until I saw myself after that I was like, ‘Right, I need to fix myself.’”

Payne went on to share how much his abuse of alcohol had affected his mental health.

“There were a few pictures of me on a boat, and I was all bloated out,” he recalled. “I call it my pills-and-booze face. My face was just, like, 10 times more than it is now.”

He added, “I just didn’t like myself very much, and then I made a change.”

Payne said that because he and his former bandmates — Horan, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik — got so famous so quickly, they often had to stay in their hotel rooms and turn to the mini bar.

“So at a certain point, I just thought, ‘Well, I’m going to have a party for one,’ and that just seemed to carry on throughout many years of my life,” he remembered. “And then you look back at how long you’ve been drinking, and it’s [like], ‘Jesus Christ, that’s a long time,’ even for someone who was as young as I was. It was wild, but it was the only way you could get the frustration out in the day.”

Payne said there were moments of toxicity and that although he is grateful for being a part of the band, he didn’t always have the “freedom to make choices and freedom to do stuff.”

The “X Factor” alum confessed at the time that he — like many people — adopted an unhealthy lifestyle during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he suddenly went from extremely busy to having nothing to do at all.

He explained how easy it was to turn to alcohol, saying that there were no boundaries with drinking during that time.

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