72 Hours of Surveillance: Inside the Betrayal That Exposed Giveon and Inspired His 1,000-Day Album of Heartbreak

The voice is pure velvet, a deep, resonant baritone that stops listeners mid-scroll, conjuring images of vintage soul and vulnerable, heartbroken romance. Giveon Dezmon Evans, the Long Beach native who rose from obscurity to R&B stardom seemingly overnight, built his empire on the very concept of emotional honesty. His hits, such as “Heartbreak Anniversary” and “Like I Want You,” became the anthems for a generation navigating the complexities of modern love and sorrow.

Yet, in a stunning twist of real-life drama that eclipsed any lyric he’d ever penned, Giveon would become less the voice of vulnerability and more the architect of one of the messiest, most premeditated cheating scandals in recent music history. The betrayal wasn’t a fleeting mistake; it was an intricately planned, three-day digital conspiracy, watched in real-time by the woman he was lying to.

This is the story of how singer and model Justine Skye turned into a covert digital operative, how a secret 72-hour surveillance mission exposed a web of deceit, and how the resulting public annihilation forced Giveon to spend 1,000 days in the creative crucible, culminating in the album Beloved—a chronicle of regret born from brutal, public humiliation.

The Architect of Soul: From Shrimp Suit to Stardom

Born in Long Beach, California, on February 21, 1995, Giveon’s upbringing was steeped in the very music that would later define his sound. Raised by a single mother—a nurse who worked grueling graveyard shifts from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.—money was always tight. But music was the constant, a soundtrack to resilience. Giveon’s mother, an unwavering matriarch, had a specific routine: whenever she cleaned, she played what he affectionately calls “black woman heartbreak music”—Mary J. Blige, Anita Baker, the greats of soulful lament. This early, immersive education in emotional storytelling and vocal power laid his foundational groundwork.

Giveon’s vocal training, however, was far more eccentric. His mother, noticing her son’s natural ability to hold a note and stay in key, became his unwitting “Mr. Miyagi.” For years, his only performance was singing “Happy Birthday” at every family gathering. He honed his craft without realizing it was training.

The true breakthrough, however, came with a moment of crisis. As a teenager, his voice dropped into the rich, low-frequency baritone that is now his trademark, and he hated it, feeling it was “weird.” Confidence plummeted until he joined a music education program at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. It was there he discovered the legendary Frank Sinatra. Sinatra’s mastery of the baritone validated Giveon’s unique voice, allowing him to fuse that classic approach with the R&B storytelling of his youth, citing influences like Frank Ocean and Miguel.

Before he became the voice of a generation, he was merely an employee in a shrimp suit. Scrapping an early EP because he felt he hadn’t “lived enough” to write authentic heartbreak, Giveon took a job at Bubba Gump Shrimp. Not just a server, he was the mascot, walking around in a literal shrimp costume, quizzing customers on Forrest Gump trivia. He quit on impulse one day after a child wanted a picture, walking out with no plan, no money, and later supporting himself by starting a dog-walking business.

It was this period of hustle and obscurity that gave him the material he needed. He studied the greatest artists of all time, created the tracks “Garden Kisses” and “Fields,” and when they went viral, the industry took notice. Producer Sevn Thomas (Rihanna, Beyoncé) connected with him, leading to “Like I Want You” and a deal with Epic Records. His feature on Drake’s 2020 track “Chicago Freestyle” solidified his arrival, although half of Twitter initially confused his voice with another artist. His two critically acclaimed 2020 EPs, Take Time and When It’s All Said and Done, cemented his status as a soulful prodigy.

The Covert Operation: 72 Hours of Real-Time Betrayal

By late 2020, Giveon had met Justine Skye, a singer and model in her own right. For 14 months, their relationship was public and seemingly harmonious, even leading to them living together. Justine thought everything was fine—until she gained secret access to his phone.

What happened next was not a simple, messy discovery, but a calculated, clinical operation of emotional surveillance that redefined the celebrity cheating scandal. Instead of immediately confronting him, Justine held her composure, and for 72 agonizing hours, she watched.

In her own words, it was a “CIA mission.”

While Giveon was out of town, ostensibly on business, Justine was watching him coordinate multiple hookups. The surveillance was brutal, played out in real-time. On Day One, she watched him text other women while he was actually in her hometown. The cognitive dissonance was jarring: he would call her, play the role of the loving boyfriend, telling her to “get some rest” for her show the next day in Atlanta. The moment he hung up, he immediately began texting other women to plan his infidelity.

Day Two brought more of the same—more women, more meticulously crafted lies. Justine, playing the doting girlfriend on the phone, maintained a front of normalcy while internally compiling evidence of his duplicity.

The climax arrived on Day Three. A girl texted Giveon, confirming their plan to meet up at his hotel that very night. Justine was ready. She had her close friends on FaceTime on her computer, her own phone in one hand, and Giveon’s phone in the other. She watched him text the other woman, all while still calling Justine “babe” and lying about his own whereabouts, claiming he was simply “going out with friends.”

Justine gave him multiple opportunities to confess, to be honest, or simply to step back from the brink, but he doubled down on the deceit, insisting on his fictitious narrative. The tension was unbearable, culminating when the girl texted the final, damning message: “I’m here.”

The Truth Bomb and the Gaslight

At this point, Justine made her move. She called Giveon, who, naturally, didn’t answer. She called again. When he finally called her back, he didn’t offer a desperate, stammering apology. Instead, he deployed the ultimate weapon of the emotional manipulator: gaslighting.

“What the [expletive]! Why are you acting like this? Your friend is an idiot. They’re lying.” He accused her of irrationality, trying to turn the fault onto her and her friends, and then declared, “I’m done, you’re done.”

That was the moment Justine dropped the truth bomb. She sent him a single photograph: a picture of his own phone, in her hand, displaying the texts where he and his friends had been formulating the lies. The game was over.

The response was not a confession, nor was it a panicked defense. It was eight minutes of complete, deafening silence. When Giveon finally reached out, his first words weren’t “I’m sorry,” but a reflection of his immediate self-preservation: “Are you trying to ruin me? You told everyone.”

The lack of remorse, the sheer audacity of questioning her intent after such a spectacular betrayal, became the lasting image of the scandal. Justine Skye went on Instagram Live in December 2021, pouring out the entire story, complete with receipts, shocking the R&B community. She delivered the final, powerful verdict: “People like that don’t last. That for sure was the craziest lie I have ever caught someone in.”

The Aftermath: 1,000 Days of Beloved

The internet exploded. Giveon disappeared, entering a period of silence and creative introspection. The public exposure had stripped him bare, forcing the velvet-voiced romantic to confront the callous reality of his actions.

It took 1,000 days for him to emerge with his 2024 album, Beloved. He later admitted that the turmoil of the Justine Skye situation happened right in the middle of the recording process. Beloved is, in essence, an artistic documentation of the aftermath—the heartbreak and the regret.

The album is marked by a deep sense of introspection, produced with 98% live instrumentation, giving it a raw, confessional quality. Songs like “Keeper” speak to the challenges of keeping secrets, a profound irony given his spectacular failure to keep his own. Most tellingly, the song “Trying to Be” contains a self-aware warning to a new woman, where he sings, “I ain’t did nothing yet, but there’s a chance.” It’s a lyric that acknowledges his infidelity, almost cautioning future partners to be wary, embodying a new, more guarded perspective on love. He’s no longer singing about a love he’s experienced, but a love he fears.

As of 2025, Giveon remains single, operating with a newfound, hyper-cautious guard up. He’s picky about who he dates and admits to only offering a non-committal “All right, all right, back at you for now” instead of “I love you.” The betrayal was not just a public scandal; it became the dominant influence on his art and his personal life. He remains in Long Beach, a city that has honored him with his own “Giveon Day,” alongside a “Pearl Day” for his mother, a testament to his undeniable talent and rise.

From a teenager embarrassed by his voice, to a server in a shrimp suit, to a viral R&B star, Giveon’s story is a compelling, yet cautionary, tale of a musician whose personal life spectacularly collapsed under the weight of his own calculated deceit. He may have spent a thousand days creating an album about love, but it was his public downfall that gave his music the authenticity—and the painful resonance—it now possesses. The tragedy is that he had to experience the public destruction of his reputation to finally become the heartbreak artist his mother’s music had prepared him to be.