On October 13 last year, Liam Payne asked Roger Nores if he would be best man at his wedding to his girlfriend Kate Cassidy. Roger gladly accepted – even though Liam had yet to propose.
Three days later, the former One Direction star would be dead.
‘I was heartbroken when I heard, of course,’ Roger tells the Mail in his first major interview since the tragic accident. ‘But it’s so much more than that. I still think I’m going to bump into him, or my phone’s going to ring and he’ll be on the other end of the line.’
It is almost exactly five months to the day since Payne’s fatal fall from a third-floor balcony of the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires. Nores had left Liam in the lobby at 4.06pm on October 16, when the star appeared sober and in good spirits.
However, over the next 40 minutes, Liam appears to have embarked on a drugs spree that culminated in him ‘convulsing’ on the hotel lobby floor at around 4.50pm, according to one witness. Four minutes later, hotel staff carried him up to his suite.
At 5.07pm, the singer was found dead from multiple traumatic injuries in the CasaSur’s internal courtyard.
Roger Nores says that Liam Payne was one of the best friends he’s ever had
The Argentine legal system requires prosecutors to gather evidence before any suspects can be charged. So it wasn’t until many weeks after Liam’s death, on December 30, that Judge Laura Bruniard charged five people in relation to the incident. The most high-profile among them was Roger Nores, accused of manslaughter for ‘failing to fulfil his duties of care, assistance and help’ to the singer. Roger adamantly denies the charges – and now, in today’s landmark interview, Mail readers can finally hear his story in his own words.
In this brutally honest account, Roger describes in heartbreaking detail the chaotic six months leading up to the 31-year-old singer’s fatal fall – in particular the horrifying extent of the troubled star’s drug use. For the first time, I can also reveal that, according to Roger, Liam was sectioned in May last year following a near-fatal overdose.
This is the definitive account of the singer’s final months and the most uncompromising portrait so far of the man the world fell in love with all the way back in 2008, when he first appeared on ITV’s X Factor talent show as a fresh-faced 14-year-old from Wolverhampton.
Roger and Liam met at a party in London in 2020 hosted by the then-editor of British Vogue, Edward Enninful. ‘I didn’t even know who Liam was when we met,’ Roger tells me.
It was perhaps an unlikely friendship: a teetotal businessman, who had never tried a drug in his life and who doesn’t even drink caffeine, was suddenly hanging out with a pop colossus renowned for his hard-partying lifestyle – and who was suffering from serious addiction issues.
‘Liam was always so humble,’ explains Roger. ‘He never acted like a superstar. He was grounded. And by the time I realised what he did for work, we’d already become friends.’
Roger was already hugely successful, having launched his own investment company, StoneWay Capital, aged just 23, raising $500 million to build four major power plants in Argentina. In 2018, aged just 28, he was named on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 Power List for his work in the energy sector.
Though Liam was four years younger than the now 35-year-old Roger, each referred to the other as his ‘older brother’, a term that showed their mutual respect and affection.
Roger Nores with Liam Payne and the star’s father, Geoff, in West Hollywood in June 2024
‘The truth is that we both wanted to be a little more like each other,’ Roger tells me. ‘I wanted to get out a bit more and have fun, while he wanted to be a little more boring. He would frequently help me with relationship advice; of course, Liam was great with girls. When it came to emotions, he was always a guy I could call.
‘Perhaps above everything else, though, Liam trusted me because I was one of the few people who didn’t want anything from him.’
Another source familiar with the commercial affairs of One Direction told the Mail that a sprawling entourage had gathered around Payne following the start of his solo career in 2017. ‘There were lawyers, music reps, family members – and everyone needed to be paid,’ said the source.
Roger tells me: ‘Liam wasn’t a guy who flashed money around. He would eat at McDonald’s and make jokes about other people wasting money at ludicrously expensive restaurants. For Liam, it was about where his money could make a difference.’
He adds: ‘Liam would stay up at night surfing the internet, looking for kids who were fundraising for surgery but who were in danger of not meeting their target. He’d top up the remaining amount – and he would do this three times a week.’
As a self-made tycoon, Roger had no interest in Liam’s reported £55 million fortune. And despite claims that Roger was Liam’s ‘de facto manager’ – something he firmly denies – the pair did not have any professional relationship.
Indeed, last month it emerged that Nores was suing Liam’s father, Geoff Payne, for defamation to the tune of $10 million. The astonishing legal case, brought in Florida, accuses Geoff of falsely stating that ‘due to his addictions’, Liam was in Roger’s care at the time of his death. In his complaint against Geoff, Roger again reiterates that while he had a ‘dear mutual friendship’ with the singer, he ‘never had a legal duty of care’.
The Mail has seen a letter from Liam’s own lawyer in which the attorney confirms: ‘I am not aware of Mr Payne having [a] custodian, guardian or protector appointed. To my knowledge, Mr Payne did not have any contract arrangement with Mr Nores.’
‘We were friends and that was all I wanted to be,’ Roger tells me. ‘Liam loved talking about ideas for a business partnership, and he wanted to front up the cash, but every time I told him no.’
With Roger living predominantly in Florida – he holds dual Argentine-American citizenship – he saw little of Liam during the Covid years from 2020 to 2022 beyond the occasional dinner. They mainly kept in touch with friendly phone calls. As a result, Roger had no idea quite how bad Liam’s drug usage had become.
In a podcast interview in 2021, Liam admitted that his issues with ‘pills and booze’ had in fact started long before, back when One Direction were at the height of their fame in the mid-2010s.
‘In the band … the best way to secure us, because of how big we’d got, was just to lock us in our rooms. What’s in the room? A mini-bar,’ Liam recalled. He added, all too presciently: ‘Lonely hotel rooms … really f****d me up.’
Liam Payne with his girlfriend Kate Cassidy at a film premiere in London in 2023. The pair had been living in Palm Beach, Florida, at a $9,500-per-month apartment, at the time of Liam’s death
Between 2018 and 2022, Liam was in a relationship with Texan model Maya Henry, and he proposed to her in August 2020. This week, she revealed in a magazine interview that by the time their engagement fell apart, his substance abuse had spiralled out of control.
‘On drugs, he became someone unrecognisable,’ she admitted. ‘So different from his sober self.’
An unnamed source close to Maya has alleged that Payne was ‘smoking heroin’ during the pair’s relationship and once pushed her down a flight of stairs, chased her with an axe and even threatened to leave her if she did not have an abortion.
Maya has since written about her experiences in a novel entitled Looking Forward, which revolves around a young girl’s troubled romance with a pop star, and is now understood to be largely based on her experiences with Liam.
In May 2024, five months before the singer died, Roger finally grasped just how serious Liam’s drug problem had become.
During that month, he reveals, he received a rare call from Liam’s manager, Steve Finan O’Connor. Roger answered the phone warily and then listened in stunned silence as Steve told him Liam had overdosed in Britain. The star had been rushed to hospital, where doctors had resuscitated him. Alive but in a desperate condition, Liam was now recovering in intensive care.
After Liam was discharged, his father, Geoff, had him sectioned, says Roger. ‘Originally, they tried to have him sectioned for 90 days,’ he tells me. ‘That ended up getting cut down to 30 days. But Liam talked his way out after just three.’
After Liam left hospital, he turned to the only man he could trust: Roger Nores. ‘He knew he needed help,’ Roger recalls. ‘I was in LA working at the time. I said if he could get to Miami, I’d meet him there.’
And so, in the summer of last year, Liam flew to Palm Beach, Florida, and moved into the $9,500-per-month apartment which he shared with new girlfriend, Kate Cassidy, whom he had met in 2022 at the bar in South Carolina where she was working as a waitress. Liam had asked for her number and they went on their first date the next day: lunch, ten-pin bowling and a ‘ghost tour’ of a local graveyard.
‘When I met Liam in Florida last summer, he was shivering and clearly unwell,’ says Roger. ‘He told me he’d lost 20kg and weighed just 60kg.’
Roger and another friend leapt into action, surrounding Liam with a dedicated team of medical professionals, including a psychiatrist and addiction specialist.
‘He did four months sober,’ Roger tells me. ‘He said he wanted to tour so I set him up with a representative at Creative Artists Agency. But because it’s the same firm that looks after Harry Styles, Harry had to OK the deal – which he did, of course.’
Roger remembers last summer fondly. ‘Liam then began to go to the gym every day. He was really looking after himself. And it wasn’t easy. He required 24-hour attention. Anyone who’s looked after an addict knows that it isn’t straightforward. It was draining, but I wanted to do it – that’s what friends are for. After four months, I truly believed he had turned a corner – but then everything went wrong.’
In early August 2024, Geoff Payne suggested that Liam appear as a judge on the upcoming Netflix talent show Building The Band, which was being filmed in Manchester and is slated to air later this year.
‘I didn’t want him to go,’ Roger tells me. ‘He knew too many people in the UK; it would be too easy for him to relapse. I think Liam knew it, too. We had the biggest argument of our lives. We’d worked so hard to piece his life back together and I felt all that work slipping away.’
On August 23, Roger again emailed Liam’s team in the UK, pleading with them to keep the star safe in Britain while he was filming.
In the email, seen by the Mail, Roger wrote: ‘I’m really concerned for his wellbeing while he is out there. I hope you can bring professional doctors to check on his health regularly as I did while he was out in the US. I am going to stay fully out of the picture and disconnected from now on and I wish you all the best with Liam’s health and career.’
A table surface in Liam Payne’s hotel room covered with tin foil, white powder, a lighter and scorch marks
Sadly, despite Roger’s clear warning – and just as he had feared – Liam relapsed into using drugs during filming. Roger heard the news via Liam’s then-bodyguard.
After shooting wrapped on August 30, Liam and girlfriend Kate Cassidy went on holiday to Greece. I have spoken to a friend of Kate’s who tells me the singer continued to abuse drugs and alcohol chronically during that holiday.
‘Kate would ring me in tears,’ the friend tells the Mail. ‘She was stuck in a foreign country and Liam was completely off the rails. They put out smiling images on Instagram for the fans, but the reality couldn’t have been more different.’
Liam returned to Florida that September. After spending some time with him, Roger again emailed the star’s team, writing: ‘Liam arrived in the US a few days ago and he is living at the house he is renting … I happen to be staying close by and saw Liam a couple of times over the last few days … My understanding is he hasn’t touched a single hard drug since he came back to the US.’
Sadly, the abstinence did not last.
In late September, Liam left Florida and flew to Buenos Aires, from where he could renew his US visa and also catch ex-bandmate Niall Horan in concert at the Movistar Arena. Roger flew out to join Liam, and it was in the Argentine capital, on October 13, that the singer asked Roger to be his best man at the wedding to Kate Cassidy that tragically would never take place.
‘He told me he wanted to marry Kate. We discussed ideas for his proposal and then he asked me to be best man. “You’ll have to do a speech,” he joked, but he told me it would be fun.’
Liam Payne was pictured by a fellow hotel guest checking his emails while stretched out on a sofa in the lobby of the CasaSur Palermo shortly before his death
A CCTV image of Liam Payne being taken to his room by hotel staff. He was to fall to his death from the balcony just minutes later
Three days later, at 4.06pm on October 16, Roger left Liam sober in the lobby of the CasaSur Palermo Hotel. What happened over the next hour will haunt Roger for ever. After he left, Liam made up to four trips to his hotel suite within the following half an hour. Each time he returned, his behaviour appeared more erratic.
While scrolling on his laptop, stretched out on a sofa in the hotel lobby, Liam was reported to have shouted: ‘F*** this s*** mate!’ in response to receiving an email, before smashing the computer on the floor.
In a separate outburst, the singer told a hotel guest: ‘I used to be in a boyband – that’s why I’m so f****d up.’
The next known picture of Liam is the shocking image from the hotel’s CCTV that I published in November last year. It showed CasaSur staff hauling the singer’s seemingly unconscious body through the lobby and back up to his suite, where he was to fall to his death from the balcony just minutes later.
Two of the hotel staff have since been charged by Argentine prosecutors. They are chief receptionist Esteban Grassi and hotel manager Gilda Martin. While the court must decide as to the pair’s guilt, it appears to me a misjudgment to have taken the singer up to his room rather than seeking immediate medical assistance and keeping the singer under supervision in the lobby.
Liam’s death was a global sensation. It was a particularly horrific time for Roger: not only had he lost a best friend, but he then faced lurid allegations of ‘abandoning’ Liam before his death.
‘Even after everything that’s happened,’ says Roger, ‘I don’t regret a single day with Liam because he was one of the best friends I’ve had in my life. He was an incredible human being and he deserved the best. I’m at peace because I know I helped him stay a little happier during his final six months.’
It is clear that Roger’s thoughts remain not on his own fate but on that of his departed friend.
‘The last six months of Liam’s life weren’t easy for anyone,’ says Roger. ‘He was struggling with addiction, of course. But, ultimately, here was a globally lauded pop star with enormous talent who simply wanted to be appreciated as a human being.’
