Caroline wanted to plead guilty – if she had she might still be alive
As the inquest into death of tragic Love Island presenter approaches, friends reveal a heartbreaking twist ...
IT’S a phrase that will haunt Caroline Flack’s nearest and dearest for ever. The TV presenter told them she would ‘rather die’ than see police bodycam footage of her on the night she hit her boyfriend with a lamp made public in court.
The recording shows her covered in her own blood, crying like a baby after the attack – for which she was charged with common assault – and has been described as ‘like a horror movie’. While her family, friends and fans were in no doubt that Flack was struggling to come to terms with losing her job, her home, the love of her life, and perhaps her dignity, as a result of her arrest last December, they could have had little idea that she really meant she’d ‘rather die’.
Her fears that the lurid images of her, severely distressed, barely clothed and with self-inflicted cuts, would be put into the public domain have been described as one of the contributing factors behind her taking her own life at the age of 40 in February.
This is one of the heart-wrenching details that is expected to emerge at the forthcoming inquest into her death, laying bare the final months in the life of the vivacious, much- l oved presenter of I TV’s Love Island.
And The Mail on Sunday can reveal how Flack – Carrie to her grieving parents and four siblings – was adamant that she had wanted to plead guilty to beating Lewis Burton, a model and former tennis player, at her North London flat in the early hours of December 12.
It was a move approved by one of her most trusted and long-standing showbiz friends, Russell Brand, who believed it would have been the best way forward.
Her legal team didn’t agree, though, instead advising Flack to plead not guilty at the first hearing at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court on Christmas Eve last year.
Taking their advice, the date of March 4 was then set for her trial.
‘She desperately wanted to plead guilty,’ says one of her friends. ‘She thought it would mean she could move on with her life.
‘Yes, she was distraught at what she did but in her eyes it was an accident. She didn’t care about losing her job on Love Island. She just wanted the whole episode to go away. In any case, she felt she had done five years of Love Island and perhaps it was time it came to an end.
‘You can’t stop thinking that if she had pleaded guilty, she would be alive today. She felt so much shame at the thought of that footage coming out, it was too much to bear. She would say that she’d rather die than it come out publicly in court but we didn’t realise she actually meant it.’
WHILE Flack’s loyal team never gave up hope t he charges would be dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), in early February she was told the trial would go ahead in three weeks’ time. Just days later she hanged herself.
For a woman renowned – and loved – for wearing her heart on her sleeve and sharing so much of her life publicly on social media, feeling shackled by a pending court case was hard to deal with.
In her penultimate Instagram post, she pointedly alluded to the fact she had been silenced, saying: ‘Been advised not to go on social media… this kind of scrutiny and speculation is a lot to take on for one person to take on their own… I’m a human being at the end of the day and I’m not going to be silenced when I have a story to tell and a life to keep going with.’
Just four days after her death, Flack’s mother released a statement from her daughter which Caroline had been advised not to make public about the attack on her boyfriend. It said she had ‘taken responsibility for what happened’. It added: ‘The truth is… It was an accident.’
Tragically, she never had t he chance to make that clear in court. To quote a friend: ‘Caroline simply wanted her little voice to be heard.’
Instead of being allowed to face responsibility with courage, Flack was persuaded by her advisers to appeal for the case to be dropped. The Mail on Sunday has learnt that the plea went as high as the Attorney General’s office, with Flack hopeful it would not proceed, particularly as her boyfriend – who had pointed out ‘arguments do happen every day in every relationship’ – did not want the case to go to court.
Three weeks ago, Ed Beltrami, head of the CPS in North London, insisted he was right to pursue the charges, saying there was a risk of ‘repetition’ if the case had been dropped.
Initially, he claimed that Flack had admitted guilt to police when they
She felt so much shame at the thought of that footage coming out
responded to an emergency call from a bloodied Burton, but later backtracked. Police continued with the charges – leading Flack’s management company, Money Talent Management, to react on the day of her death, describing it as a ‘show trial’ that was ‘without merit and not in the public interest’.
Significantly, there is little doubt that the majority of the blood found by police at her £1 million Islington flat was hers.
Indeed, she spent ten hours in hospital before being taken to a police cell and held until the following morning.
At first, she was told she would be released without further action. But 60 minutes later her world came crashing down when she was told she would be charged. It is then
perhaps no surprise that Flack’s friends are angry and upset that her frail mental state was not considered sufficiently by the justice system. Despite not having been convicted of any offence, she lost her £ 1. 2 million- a- year j ob on ITV2’s dating show almost immediately, being replaced by presenter Laura Whitmore.
While those close to Flack say she knew that there was no guarantee of getting her job back if she was found not guilty, ITV bosses say she was offered support. At the same time, Channel 4 axed a reality programme called The Surjury which she had filmed.
Within days of the attack on her boyfriend, River Island, the highstreet fashion chain with which she had a lucrative endorsement contract, announced it had no plans to work with her, and her six-figure contract with Polaroid sunglasses was ‘put on hold’.
At the time, Flack had hoped to upgrade from her modest one-bedroom home to a bigger one. Instead, she rented it out and moved to another apartment a few miles away, where she was to be found dead.
What particularly galled her was t hat her bai l c o ndi t i o ns meant that she was not allowed any contact with her 27-year-old lover – a man she felt, despite their 13- year age gap, might be The One after many tumultuous failed relationships.
In fact, Burton, too, was devastated by the bail conditions, saying: ‘It’s heartbreaking I can’t see my girlfriend over Christmas. Gutted
I am not allowed to protect her right now.’ Four months on, he is still said to be ‘desperately cut up about it all’. Meanwhile, as they prepare for the inquest into her death to be held in August at Poplar Coroner’s Court in East London, Flack’s friends can only guess at what might have been. One says: ‘Caroline had made a lot of money and was looking forward to moving on in her life. She finally thought she had found a lovely man and work was going well. I think she would have been happy to run off into the sunset with him. ‘ Then i t all collapsed around her.’ Friends say that she had at last started to ignore the criticism that has become part of being a showbiz celebrity in the social- media age. There were still emotional scars over poisonous jibes about her having dated the much-younger heartthrob Harry Styles, of boyband One Direction. At the time, she seemed obsessed with looking online at such remarks. ‘It was kind of self-harm,’ one source says. ‘She would beat herself up for days with what was written. It was heartbreaking to watch but she cared so much about what people said about her.’ There were barbs, too, about her weight. Her reaction to these ran so deep that even trying on an outfit that was a little too tight could sometimes ruin her day. And she was known to reject requests from River Island to make personal appearances at shops because she feared, without any evidence, that no one would turn up.
Caroline was laid to rest on March 10 in a Norfolk forest near to where she was born and grew up. She was surrounded for one last time that day by parents Christine and Ian, her twin Jody, elder sister Elizabeth and elder brother Paul – as well as a gathering of her closest friends who loved her unconditionally.
For the public – with whom she had such a good relationship even though she may not have always realised it – Caroline Flack’s last goodbye was in the form of her final post on Instagram, two days before she was found dead by her heartbroken father.
Featuring four joyful Polaroid photos of her and her beloved pug Ruby (now adopted by her friend Mollie Grosberg), she attached alongside a single red heart emoji for her 2.6 million followers.
They remain there – in digital perpetuity – an unwitting sign-off from a woman who will for ever be remembered as a victim of our celebrity-driven age.
She was looking forward to moving on … then it all collapsed around her