Selena Gomez speaks out about viral photo with Hailey Bieber: 'It's not a big deal'

Selena Gomez is speaking out for the first time about the snapshot of her and Hailey Bieber that went viral last month.

In the photo, Gomez and Hailey were seen hanging out at an event at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and when asked about it during a recent interview, Gomez said, “Yeah, it’s not a big deal.

“It’s not even a thing,” she told Vulture.

Fans have pitted Gomez and Hailey against each other ever since Hailey married Gomez’s ex-boyfriend, Justin Bieber. Gomez and Justin dated on and off from 2010 until 2018 after first meeting as teenagers, quickly becoming one of the music industry’s hottest couples and one beloved by both their fans. When Gomez and Justin broke up for good in 2018, Justin and Hailey announced they had gotten married a few short months later in September of that year.

Fans turned the two women against each other after Justin Bieber married Hailey Bieber. (Getty Images)

When photographer Tyrell Hampton posted the photo of Gomez and Hailey hugging at the event on Instagram, the comments section was full of people who were shocked by the friendship, those who didn’t believe the reconciliation to be real, and those who think it’s time to leave them alone and move on.

“Maybe now everyone can stop talking about these people and let them live in peace,” one commenter wrote. “The whole point of this picture is to make a statement. That it’s all good. So let it be.”

Another wrote, “how easy to fool people with this Photoshop! And poor people believe it,” while another simply called the picture “interesting.”

The infamous picture was posted only a few weeks after Hailey was interviewed on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast where she spoke about her relationship with Justin and how she deals with all the hate that comes her way with people claiming she stole Justin from Selena.

Hailey Bieber spoke about her relationship with Gomez on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, stating that there is no bad blood. (Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for The Wall Street Journal)

“Fans wish he ended up with someone else, and that’s fine,” Hailey said. “You can wish that all you want, but that’s just not the case.”

When it comes to her relationship with Gomez, she explained there is nothing but love between the two of them and that they don’t “owe anybody anything except respect.” She went on to say that she has a lot of respect for Gomez and what she has been through and that the two of them have no expectations for each other.

Gomez is set to release her new Apple TV+ documentary, “Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me,” which is a recounting of the past six years of Gomez’s life and all the hardships she endured in that time frame, including her physical and mental health struggles, her battle with Lupus and everything that came with that, the pandemic and her eventual diagnosis with bipolar disorder.

The documentary not only reminds audiences of what Gomez went through but also gives them insight into what she was thinking and how she was feeling when everything was going on.