The shock of Liam Payne's death is still fresh. Yesterday (October 16), the one-time One Direction member died at age 31 after falling off of a three-story balcony at a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The news was first reported by TMZ, then confirmed by CNN — but the former outlet's original article was later updated to include cropped photos of Payne's arms and waist, identifiable by his tattoos. "TMZ obtained a photo showing Liam's body on a wooden deck at the hotel with tables and chairs nearby," the since-updated story read. "We're not showing the whole body, but you can clearly see his tattoo — a clock on his left forearm, and a scorpion on his abdomen."
Numerous people found this distasteful, including Brampton, ON-hailing singer-songwriter Alessia Cara, who took to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter to call out the tabloid. "You're gross," she wrote, tagging TMZ's account.
The photos have since been removed, with the story now reading, "TMZ has seen a photo showing Liam's body." Plenty more has now been reported about the circumstances surrounding Payne's death, including preliminary autopsy results revealing that the singer died of 25 injuries, as well as internal and external bleeding, caused by the fall. (The report also noted a lack of signs of defensive wounds on his hands, and that the position of his body suggested that he could have been partially or fully unconscious at the time of his fall.)
Following her 2021 album In the Meantime (for which she was on the cover of Exclaim!), Cara released her comeback single earlier this year.