Kate Cassidy is opening up about her dating woes after her late boyfriend Liam Payne’s death.
“Got broken up with. I got dumped,” Cassidy, 27, said in a TikTok video on Monday, June 22. “I recently met someone. I feel like things were moving super fast, kind of. If you know me, you know I have a tendency of moving fast. Let’s just name this guy Joe. Joe was really sweet, and I feel like he was kind of, like, a lot of things that I wanted in a guy. He’s super low-key, so he doesn’t have any social media, which I actually really liked. I met his family, he took me on trips.”
The influencer explained that although things were going well with “Joe,” the pair hit a roadblock when Cassidy found herself comparing her new man to Payne, whom she dated from 2022 until his tragic death in 2024.
“I f***ed up dating after losing somebody that you genuinely thought you were gonna spend the rest of your life with,” she continued. “[It’s] really tough because I physically look for Liam in every single guy that I meet, if they don’t hit all the check marks, I tend to either back away or almost like resent this person, and it’s so crazy.”
Cassidy recalled “certain times” where she would “get so angry” with “Joe” and couldn’t help but consider what Payne would have done in those situations.
“I physically would be like, ‘Well, Liam would do this, so why aren’t you doing this?’ Or he would do something, and I would be like, ‘Liam would never do that, why are you doing that?’” she added. “He texted me yesterday and told me that we should go our separate ways, because it’s just too much, and I understand. I feel sad, because I don’t like losing people, and I feel like, especially in the beginning of a situationship, it’s so fun, and you’re so excited to see where it goes.”
Payne died at age 31 after falling off a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in October 2024. An autopsy later revealed that the singer had multiple drugs in his system at the time of the fatal fall. Cassidy had been vacationing with the former One Direction singer at the time, returning home to the United States days before his death. She later opened up about her regrets over leaving the country so soon.
“Love is so optimistic, and you just hope that everything will work out at the end. Obviously, if I knew, if I could see into the future, I would never have left Argentina,” she told The Sun in February 2025. “I just never thought this would have happened, that it would turn out the way it did. It still doesn’t feel fully real for me that he’s not here.”
Cassidy has since kept fans updated on her journey navigating grief and moving on from Payne’s death. She revealed in April that she had begun dating more than one year after the loss.
“This is so new to me,” she said at the time. “I’m just kind of in the headspace where I’m down to give whoever a chance. … I feel really excited, to be honest.”
