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Scooter Braun feels he “failed” Justin Bieber during his “dark” period

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 23 November 2017

Artist manager Scooter Braun has said that he feels he “failed” his client Justin Bieber during a troubled few years in the musician’s life, which came to a head in 2014.

Speaking to Complex in an interview for the magazine’s Blueprint video series, Braun said that he felt unable to help Bieber during that period. He added that for a time he had been scared that the singer would die.

“When he turned eighteen, we had a rough patch”, he says. “I think that’s his story to tell, and I think that at the right time he’ll tell the complete story. [Though] I think his perspective, and [that of] some of us who were there, are going to be very different, because a lot of it he doesn’t remember. It was just a very tough time. What I can tell you is, I learned a lot at that time about patience. I learned a lot about dealing with someone else who’s going through that”.

“At the end of the day, I failed”, he continues. “Because if it was up to me, for a year and a half none of that would have happened. But for a year and a half I tried everything, and I failed because he was still in that dark place. It wasn’t until one day something happened, he called me and he said, ‘this happened and enough is enough, I need to make a change’, and he asked me to help him with that change”.

He could then help, he added, “because I’d been doing the research and I had the resources to do so. And I helped, but what you learn in that process is that you can help someone as much as you want, but they have to make the conscious decision that they want to make a change”.

Asked if there was any point during that time that he thought his professional relationship with Bieber might end, he said: “To me, the only point I had where [I thought] ‘is it over?’, wasn’t a scary ‘[is my] career over?’, I thought I was gonna lose him. I thought he was gonna die. That was the scariest thing, because he’s an adult, so he could go away from me. I couldn’t force him to stay next to me. There were points where I didn’t know if in the morning he was going to be there. I was petrified. I was doing everything I could, and I think he knows that. And at the end of the day, for him to come out of that and be where he is today is a testament to his strength”.

Watch the full interview, in which Braun also discusses his management career from its beginnings to the present day, and the One Love Manchester concert staged in the wake of the terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande show earlier this year, here: