A victim of the fame game?
The suicide of Caroline Flack has “provoked an outpouring of anguish”, said Melanie Phillips in The Times – and of rage. The presenter of Love Island, who had a history of anxiety and depression, was awaiting trial for assaulting her boyfriend, Lewis Burton, when she died last weekend. The following day, her management company turned on the Crown Prosecution Service, accusing it of staging a “show trial” and pushing ahead with the case, although Flack was fragile and Burton did not want to press charges. Others blamed Love
Island’s producers, pointing out that two contestants had also died by suicide. Many more, though, blamed the tabloids and social media. Hundreds of celebrities and others appealed for a “Caroline’s law” against media intrusion. On her Radio 5 Live show, Flack’s friend Laura Whitmore declared: “To paparazzi and tabloids looking for a cheap sell, to trolls hiding behind a keyboard: enough!”
It’s wrong to blame the prosecutors, said Joan Smith in The Guardian. It isn’t up to victims to press charges – in domestic violence cases, the lawyers often go ahead without cooperation, for good reasons. The press, though, is a different matter. Few defendants have been subjected to the “onslaught of heartless publicity” that Flack had to endure. It was “open season” as soon as her arrest became public. The Sun called her “Caroline Whack” – she allegedly hit Burton with a lamp. The tabloids even printed pictures of her bloodspattered flat. She was mobbed by photographers; no one called off the dogs, despite her “obvious vulnerability”. And where the media goes, social media follows.
This is one of the “great hypocrisies of the British public”, Roy Greenslade told The New York Times: that they avidly read everything about these celebrities, and increasingly write about them online too. “Then when things go wrong, they turn on the media and say it’s all the media’s fault.” Flack is yet another casualty of our obsessive curiosity about the lives of strangers, and the industry that exploits it, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. “As long as we have celeb culture – and it is nothing new – we will have celeb tragedies.”