Watch: Little Mix’s Perrie Edwards Gives Birth, Welcomes Baby No. 2 with Fiancé Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain
Perrie Edwards is giving a shoutout to her ex.
Over 10 years after the Little Mix member and Zayn Malik called off their engagement, Edwards is addressing their breakup and his subsequent romance with Gigi Hadid.
“I need to be careful how I say this,” Edwards—who met Malik on The X Factor in 2011—admitted during a June 10 appearance on Great Company with Jamie Laing. “There was a bit of a, I’m just going to say it, so, there was a bit of an overlap.”
For Edwards, it felt like the relationship between Malik and Hadid—an on-off couple from 2015 and 2021—had likely made it easier for the One Direction member to call off their four-year relationship, two of which they spent engaged.
“When you’re moving on with somebody else, you always get on better,” Edwards reasoned. “When you’re the one left behind—that’s what’s hard. Because it’s like, ‘Oh s–t they’ve left me for someone more beautiful than me, someone better than me.’ Whatever it is. That’s how it felt at the time.”
And the 32-year-old—mom to Axel, 4, and Alanis, 5 months, with fiancéAlex Oxlade-Chamberlain—felt that Hadid starring in the music video for Malik’s 2016 hit “PILLOWTALK” was the “nail in the coffin.”
“Then you have a song that they’ve written about you and then somebody else is in the video,” Edwards recalled. “It was one thing after the other, after the other.”
The “Wings” singer admitted her family didn’t know how to help her through the heartbreak.
“I thought, ‘This is getting a bit much,’” Edwards shared. “I started crying my eyes out and my dad started crying and he was like ‘I don’t know how I can take this pain away,’ and I’m like, ‘You can’t. Nobody can. This is hellish. Like what is going on.’”
E! News has reached out to reps for Malik and Hadid but has not yet heard back.
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For his part, Malik—who welcomed a daughter with Hadid in 2020—previously admitted he wrote the single “shortly after” he left One Direction in March 2015 but resisted revealing its muse. (Edwards and Malik called it quits in August 2015, and he stepped out with Hadid that November.)
“I don’t want to be too specific about what it’s about,” he said during a February 2016 appearance on The Zach Sang Show. “That is obviously quite personal to me. People can figure it out for themselves.”
Meanwhile, this isn’t the first time Malik has addressed past alleged indiscretions concerning his relationship with Edwards. In 2015, he denied that he ended their relationship over the phone, an allegation his ex has maintained.
“It was horrible, the worst time in my life,” Edwards wrote in her girl group’s 2016 book Our World. “A four-year relationship, two-year engagement ended by a simple text message. Just like that.”
But when it comes to looking back at his relationship with Edwards as a whole, Malik—who claimed in 2024 following his relationships with both Edwards and Hadid he had “never been in love”—the “Better” singer has admitted he was immature.
“From 17 to 21, I was in a relationship,” Malik said in an interview with Nylon published in 2024. “I was engaged. I didn’t know anything about anything at that point. I thought I did, because I was 21. I was legally allowed to do everything, but I didn’t know s–t.”
For more recent celebrity breakups, keep reading…
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