I tried to buy a gun to kill myself – Danny Cipriani
As Caroline Flack’s unpublished Instagram post reveals the truth of her emotional breakdown, Louise Gannon shares how other stars have coped with public humiliation
DANNY CIPRIANI, the rugby player, has released an emotional video message describing the “guilt” and “anger” he feels over the death of Caroline Flack, his former girlfriend, and revealing that he once tried to buy a gun to kill himself.
The 32-year-old said he wanted to speak out about his own mental health struggles in an attempt to show that “it’s OK to be vulnerable”.
He fought back tears as he said he desperately hoped his honesty might encourage people to be kind.
Cipriani briefly dated Flack, 40, last year. He said they had remained close and that she “made him feel safe”, allowing him to open up to her.
“Ultimately it was embarrassment and shame that killed her,” he said.
“So I’m telling everyone now what my most embarrassing and shameful moments are, because I know that she knew I had the strength to do this.
“She knew everything about me, so that’s why I’m telling you.”
Cipriani described how the former Love Island presenter had called him “in her last moments” and also texted him to say that she was going to have to plead guilty to the assault charge she faced over an alleged fracas with her boyfriend.
He was unable to take the call or respond to the text because he was playing for Gloucester against Exeter in the Gallagher Premiership.
The following day, he discovered that Flack had taken her own life, leaving him “broken”.
Cipriani struggled to look at the camera as he recorded the 18-minute Instagram message. He spoke haltingly and was clearly distressed. But he said he was sharing his experiences because they were things he had spoken to Flack about, things which he hoped had “given her some light”. “Ultimately, it wasn’t enough,” he said. “I’m not saying it was my fault in terms of not giving her information, because I tried. Some people don’t have the fight in them or don’t have the fight for 20 years. She was dealing with this for 20 years.”
Cipriani said he was very vulnerable when he was with Flack but told her everything about him, because he felt safe with her.
“I told her all the things I was embarrassed and shameful about,” he said. “She made me feel OK.” He revealed that when he was 22, he suffered with “severe depression” and was seeing a psychiatrist. “I met a guy who was at a nightclub,” he said. “I knew he was a bad man, was in the scene, trying to make his way in whatever he was doing.
“I decided at this point it was time for me to take my own life and I tried to buy a gun from him. I pulled out. Then I tried to buy it again, but I pulled out. This went on for two months. I couldn’t do it. Because I had some fight in me.” Cipriani also spoke of the pain caused by his father leaving when he was 10, forcing his mother to work long hours, leaving him without the love and attention he needed.
He added: “I’m trying to say it’s OK to be vulnerable. I’m trying to say it doesn’t matter what people say about you.
“We need to change. Embarrassment and shame is not something that should make you do this.” He ended the video by revealing that he had written Flack messages that she would never read as he struggled to come to terms with her death.
Amid the shock, blame, confusion and the swirling headlines that surround the death of Caroline Flack, it has been left to the presenter herself to tell the world exactly why she was driven to suicide.
Three days after Caroline’s body was found in her north London flat, her mother, Christine, asked the family’s local newspaper in Norwich to print an unpublished Instagram post that her daughter had sent at the end of January. Caroline’s advisers had apparently stopped her from putting it out on social media, fearing it would be too damaging. Damaging, because it told the absolute truth.
The poignant and heartbreaking post is one that should be writ large and handed out to any young wannabe who believes that becoming a celebrity is all about living the dream. In the post, she explained she had been “having some sort of emotional breakdown for a very long time”.
This beautiful, funny, troubled 40-year-old could no longer cope with the drama and public humiliation that went hand-in-hand with being Caroline Flack. Intellectually, she knew – as she told me many times – that her career was, in part, predicated on her rather scandalous reputation. This was the girl who went out and partied, the girl who had been linked romantically to
Prince Harry, then dated One Direction’s Harry Styles when he was 17 and she was 31; the girl whose dates and messy break-ups guaranteed her (and the TV shows she was fronting) endless headlines.
She was supposed to have a thick skin. She was supposed to laugh it all off. And then – shock, horror – it spiralled out of control. In December, police wearing body cameras were called to a domestic disturbance at her home and she was arrested, covered in blood, and charged with assaulting her boyfriend Lewis Burton, the 27-yearold former tennis pro, who pleaded with the police to drop the charges.
The social media tide turned, she “stepped down” from Love Island, no longer that ditsy, lovable Caroline, but a woman whose love life had just got way too messy; a woman crying out to say she was having a mental health breakdown but told it was best to keep that quiet; a woman trapped by her own celebrity.
“Within 24 hours, my whole world and future was swept from under my feet and all the walls that I had taken so long to build around me, collapsed. I am suddenly on a different kind of stage and everyone is watching it happen,” she wrote in the unpublished Instagram post.
Yesterday, her former boyfriend Danny Cipriani, the England rugby player, released an emotional 18-minute speech on his Instagram account in which he spoke out about his own mental state in the wake of Caroline’s death. In it, he revealed that she had tried to call him in the hours before she took her own life, and that “it was ultimately embarrassment and shame that killed her”.
Fame is many things. As David Bowie said, it puts you there where things are hollow. It magnifies who people think you are. And, in this world of social media, camera phones and celebrity obsession, there is no escape. When you make a mistake, we all know about it. “The thing with being famous, right,” Liam Gallagher told me one night backstage at the Brit Awards, “is that we get to do all the things every other f----- wants to do, but we can do it big time. You can go out with your mates and get smashed – but you have to work the next day. I can go on a five-day bender in a mint
In this world there is no escape. When you make a mistake, we all know about it
There is a multibillion-dollar industry hiding uncomfortable truths
hotel, with the best drugs and have whatever I want. Who wants boring rock stars? You want to live vicariously through us. You don’t want to hear me bleating about my pain, you want to see me out there living it large. Until it all goes t--- up, and then no one wants to know. What sort of headf--- is that?”
As a celebrity interviewer for the past two decades, I’ve seen the different ways that stars deal with making mistakes in public. I’ve also seen the people around them whose job it is never to admit that any mistakes have been made, in a world where it’s completely OK to behave in the most outrageous way, but it’s never OK to admit you have a serious mental health issue.
There is a multi-billion-dollar industry focused on protecting celebrity images from any uncomfortable truths. I’ve had to sign a document saying I would not ask one clearly mentally unstable superstar “uncomfortable questions about the past”, and another document saying that I wouldn’t say anything about the document.
Once you are on the inside of that world, it’s easy to see why drink and drugs are such a well-used crutch. In an interview with The New York Times this week, Ben Affleck, the actor, opened up about his alcoholism – something he had refused to talk about for decades, protected by publicists who ensured no questions on the subject were ever asked. But Affleck’s relief is
almost palpable as he discusses his mental health, his self-loathing and his shame at all those humiliating public displays of drunkenness, the breakdown of his marriage to Jennifer Garner, his most mortifying moments turned into a meme for the amusement of others, just as Caroline’s assault case was turned into an “I’ll lamp you” Valentine’s card.
Affleck admits his way of coping with shame – drinking himself into oblivion – only accelerated the problem. “You do more of it to make that discomfort go away… then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle,” he says.
I am more aware than most of the vulnerability and torment behind the glitter of stardom. I’ve sat with performer Sheridan Smith telling me, through tears, of the moment when, at the Baftas in 2016, Graham Norton made a joke about her drinking. She was dealing with the grief of her dying father, and suddenly was so humiliated at the sound of everyone around her laughing. She could not even remember the days that followed, so locked was she in a spiral of shame and alcohol.
“I was meant to be always saying everything was wonderful, but it wasn’t,” Sheridan told me. “Life isn’t like that. And I became a problem for everyone, because I couldn’t lie anymore. I fell apart completely in public. And, genuinely, I thought I’d blown it.”
The way celebrities deal with public humiliation is complex and often bizarre. Dannii Minogue told me she dealt with the massive negative press about her during her X Factor years by pumping her face with Botox. “I wanted to have no expressions on my face because I was so desperately unhappy. I used Botox to give me a mask,” she said.
Cheryl Tweedy talked about her emotional breakdown after her two marriages ended in much-publicised divorce, and again the public had fallen out of love with her. “No one could make me feel worse about myself than I did. I used to look in the mirror and say: ‘You silly cow, you stupid b----.’ It was constant, this voice in my head.’”
And, years ago, Tina Turner told me how, after her career tanked when she ran away from her abusive marriage to Ike, she stood getting changed in a
‘I wanted to have no expressions on my face. I used Botox to give me a mask’
restaurant loo on her way to a record company meeting and burst into tears as she looked at her measly possessions in a plastic shopping bag. “So I slapped myself across the face and told myself it was my fault and I had to deal with it, and just get myself together and carry on. There was no time to feel sorry for myself,” she said.
Two years ago, when I was in Los Angeles writing Mel B’s biography, I hesitantly told the former Spice Girl that the only way to deal with everything she’d been through – from working-class Leeds girl to massive fame, the crazy years with the Spice Girls, the failed marriages, the abusive relationship with her ex-husband Stephen Belafonte, and the endless negative press that followed – was to tell the truth. That involved her discussing her mental health issues, along with her attempted suicide and the drinking and the drug-taking that were, in part, the side effect of fame, but largely down to the cycle of abuse of her toxic marriage.
The book was entitled Brutally Honest and when she read it for the first time, she called me in the middle of the night, screaming and crying, and telling me that there was no way she was going to let it be published. It was too exposing, it was going to ruin her, she couldn’t cope with people knowing everything. We talked for hours, and then, the following day, she knew that publishing it was the right thing to do.
It was an incredibly brave decision, but one that prompted Women’s Aid to ask her to be their patron, and Theresa May, then prime minister, to invite both her and myself to Downing Street to assist on a domestic violence Bill.
Christine Flack did a very brave thing when she allowed that Instagram post to be published. She let her daughter’s “little voice” be heard. Now we need to listen.