There is a bench in a woodland in Norfolk that, in springtime, is surrounded by daffodils. It is where Christine Flack goes to feel like she's alone with her daughter, Caroline Flack, who took her own life on February 15, 2020.
When the Love Island presenter died, the Metropolitan Police had been pursuing an assault charge against her in what her management would call a "show trial". She had been chased out of her home by paparazzi and allegedly dropped by TV channels, her life the topic of social media spats, watercooler conversations and radio panel shows. She was public property.
But up there, among the trees, it is quiet. "Our beautiful girl", reads a memorial on the bench placed there by her family, "whose tiny feet made such a big imprint on the world … Just to have another moment, another kiss, another smile. One more chance to hear you laughing or just to hold you for a while." Christine, 71, goes there each week to sit, to think, to talk to Caroline. On Christmas Day she met another woman visiting the memorial of her own daughter who had died in a car crash. They laughed at the absurdity of it, two mothers standing in the middle of a wood on Christmas morning to be near their children.
Caroline Flack was 40 years old when she died, one of the UK's most recognisable TV presenters — the face of Love Island and The X Factor, and a winner of Strictly Come Dancing. She always looked as though she was having great fun, with fabulous outfits, hot boyfriends and wild mates, brilliant at being so very alive. But there were also darker moments that, until the end, were kept private. On the news of her death there was a collective outpouring of grief. #BeKind trended on social media and there was a mass reckoning with how we scrutinise female celebrities.
"I think about Carrie always," Christine says. "There isn't any time I don't think of her. She was a big part of our lives, she was the centre. She …" Christine trails off, struggling to continue. "It is ironic, but she did love life. I want to do away with the negative because that wasn't her. The things written about her just weren't her. She wasn't an abuser."
On December 12, 2019, Caroline Flack was at her flat in Islington with her 27-year-old boyfriend of five months, Lewis Burton, a former professional tennis player and model. They had both been drinking. As Burton slept, according to court reports, Caroline found texts on his phone about a relationship with another woman. She said she tapped him on the legs to wake him up, then on the head with his phone, in what she called a "wake-up flick", which broke the skin and drew blood. At 5.25am he called emergency services and, according to a police report, allegedly mouthed "You're f***ed" to Caroline, who was known to be terrified of media intrusion.
Caroline smashed a glass candle holder and cut her wrist with it so badly that she would need plastic surgery. Eight minutes later she opened the door to the police, covered in blood and without clothes on, "like a horror movie", according to one officer. She was taken to hospital, where she was treated, then to Holborn police station, where Christine says she was held in custody for 24 hours on suspicion of assault.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) initially ruled that she should be released with a caution. Caroline had admitted guilt, which is a requirement for a caution. She told officers: "I hit him [Burton], he was cheating on me. I whacked him round the head … There is no excuse for it, I was just upset. I admit I did it." She claimed there was no intent of violence behind the injury.
Hours later, Caroline still in a cell, Detective Inspector Lauren Bateman appealed the CPS's decision. "It was unclear what she was admitting to and what she was saying happened," Bateman said at the inquest into Caroline's death. She had admitted to an accident, but not an assault, and the Met believed Caroline had not shown sufficient remorse. For that reason, the caution was dismissed and she was charged. However, Burton did not support the prosecution, withdrawing his complaint and calling the case a "witch hunt". At the inquest, the coroner suggested Bateman was "splitting hairs" in what she considered to be an admission of guilt. Bateman replied: "In my view, it wasn't a clear admission of what had happened."
Caroline's biggest fear, Christine says, was the bodycam footage from when the police arrived at her flat being shown if it went to court. "Carrie knew she was going mad, she'd cut herself. She was so fearful because nobody knew she'd self-harmed. [The Met's lawyers] kept saying they would show the video. She would have rather died." And, days after being told that the criminal case was going ahead, she did. "The charge shouldn't have happened," Christine adds, "none of this should have happened."
Today the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is investigating the Metropolitan Police's decision to pursue the case, looking into whether Caroline was charged because of her celebrity status. Bateman, the senior officer, denied that she was treated differently because of her fame. "All I want is for the Met to say 'it wasn't domestic abuse, we shouldn't have pursued it'," Christine says. She believes it was a "trophy" arrest for them, an assertion of power over a high-profile figure.
Public confidence in the Metropolitan Police has fallen sharply in recent years after a spate of controversies. In the wake of Sarah Everard's brutal killing by a serving policeman, female protesters were manhandled and arrested. When the sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were murdered, two police officers took selfie-style images with their bodies. More recently, officers were roundly condemned for the strip-search of a 15-year-old girl at her school in Hackney. Christine describes the Met's treatment of her daughter in the midst of a mental health crisis as "horrendous".
"The police have got worse than when I was younger," she says. We are sitting in her living room in Norwich, Caroline's Strictly glitterball trophy in the corner, a Bafta certificate for Love Island on the wall, her cat, Waffle, now Christine's, sprawled on the carpet. "To keep her in that cell for over 24 hours and leave her after she'd tried to …"
While Caroline was held in the police station with her arms bandaged up, her twin sister, Jody, waited outside for a day and a night, unable to see her. Once she was released, Caroline spent the following week hiding at Jody's house in west London. "She was hounded out of her home [by the media]," Christine says. "She couldn't go outside her door, she couldn't do anything." Christine and two of her friends went back to Caroline's flat to clear up the blood, once the police had pulled out of the scene. "And we were followed across London by paparazzi. Three 70-year-olds — we couldn't believe it."
"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," Caroline wrote at the time, published posthumously by her family in the Eastern Daily Press. "I have always taken responsibility for what happened that night. Even on the night. But the truth is … it was an accident. I've been having some sort of emotional breakdown for a very long time. But I am NOT a domestic abuser."
Then a photo appeared in the press. It was shocking, taken the night of the incident and showing bright blood across Caroline's bed sheets. At this point no one knew about her self-harm, so the public assumed the blood was Burton's and that Caroline was indeed an abuser. "But the blood was all hers because she had cut herself so badly," Christine says, looking out of her window, tears in her eyes.
On December 23, 2019, Caroline pleaded not guilty to assault by beating at Highbury Corner magistrates' court. "[Burton] said he had been asleep and was hit over the head by Caroline with a lamp," said the CPS prosecutor Kate Weiss at the hearing. After Burton's initial phone call to the police, in which he said he thought he'd been hit with a lamp, it was continually reported as having been used as a weapon. Christine vehemently denies the lamp was used, saying that the lamp did not even exist. At the time of the hearing, Burton himself said on Instagram: "Bullshit this blood isn't mine and I didn't get hit over the head with a lamp, can everyone stop now."
"It was the lies that killed her," Christine says. "Lies that were said about her in court."
Referring to Burton's emergency call, Weiss said: "He was heard asking, 'What are you doing?' and the call goes silent for some seconds. There is shouting in the background and he asked repeatedly for help to be sent to him … He says, 'She is going mad, breaking stuff, just woken up, she's cracked my head open.' " Weiss went on: "Ms Flack overturned a table and had to be restrained on the ground because of the way she was behaving … She has ruined her own life by committing the assault. Mr Burton is a victim."
It is chilling to read back, knowing the other side of the story — that Caroline was having a breakdown and it would be she who was taken to the hospital by the ambulance rather than Burton.
In the following weeks Christine remembers turning on the radio and hearing discussions about female perpetrators of domestic abuse, "inspired" by what was reported to have happened. "Caroline Whack", read one headline. "But she never hurt anyone other than herself," Christine says. "That's why this label of domestic abuse, it was so bad to her. Because that was the furthest thing from what she was."
Even in that period of darkness, there was still silliness and light. "It's hard to say someone is depressed when they're not miserable," Christine says. "She wouldn't come and mope about. She'd still be funny." The family found Caroline a new flat to rent in Stoke Newington, north London, away from the baying cameras, and helped her pack up. Caroline's only job was to buy the cardboard boxes. A dozen arrived — and they were tiny. "We laughed all day," says Christine. "Actual living — the cooking, planning, practical things — it wasn't in her. She was just hilarious chaos."
Still, Caroline couldn't stop reading the news, obsessed with what was being written but unable to respond because of the case. Christine has a box of phones and iPads that she took off her daughter, desperate to stop her going online, but she would just go out and buy a new one. "Her phone never left her hand. And at the end, that was awful."
'There was always a worry'
Caroline Flack was born in north London in November 1979, six minutes after her nonidentical twin sister, Jody. Within weeks the family moved to rural Norfolk, near to their dad's job as a sales representative for Coca-Cola; Christine working for a school and then the local newspaper. During the day Christine would put the babies in bouncy chairs facing each other to keep them entertained, and at night they would settle only in the same cot. With two older siblings, Paul and Elizabeth, the twins were "two peas in the same pod", Caroline wrote in her 2015 memoir, Storm in a C-Cup. "That bond didn't break," Christine says.
As kids they were keen performers, making up dances and putting on musicals in the living room, turning into cheeky teenagers, climbing out of their window at night to go to the café in the village. They earned their pocket money by picking daffodils one summer and working in an abattoir another, "which was basically a massive freezer. I don't know what they even did there," Christine says.
Caroline always felt the highs and lows of life acutely. "Why are you crying, Carrie?" asks her mum in one home video, as she sobs at the kitchen table. She fell hard in love with naughty boys who broke her heart, including one who worked on the waltzers when the fair came to town.
At 17, while living in Cambridge and attending dance school, Caroline tried to take her own life. "She took some tablets," Christine says. "That was shocking. She was always like it [inclined to feel down] but you never think they're going to do anything or harm themselves. From then on there was always a worry." During another period of depression in her twenties, Caroline was taken to rehab by her agent, but she checked herself out almost immediately. "She didn't hurt herself often," Christine says. "It wasn't regular, only a few times, but it was still frightening when she did."
Caroline's moods were also linked to her menstrual cycle, having a few days of near-catatonic lows each month. "Everything normally that you take in your stride, she couldn't," Christine says. "It was harder for her to handle things. She was a different person for those few days. And then she'd be fine again."
Caroline moved to London in her early twenties and, after years grafting as a jobbing presenter while working at various pizza restaurants, she landed a stint on children's TV. But her big break came in 2009 when she fronted ITV2's I'm a Celebrity spin-off show, soon followed by The Xtra Factor. When she presented The X Factor headline show with Olly Murs in 2015, Caroline was relentlessly trolled and told she looked "pregnant". It made her so self-conscious that she had a consultation for liposuction with a plastic surgeon in her dressing room. He told her she didn't need it.
Months later Christine had a call from Caroline saying she was in hospital after a fat-reduction treatment on her stomach. "She only had half done because she couldn't stand the pain," Christine says. "And she laughed and said, 'Did you ever think one of your daughters would have liposuction?' And I said, "Not someone that's seven stone, no!" I used to tell her she was gorgeous, and she'd go, well, you're my mum, of course you would say that."
McDonald's and parking tickets
Still, Caroline was known as being electrifying company, always up for a laugh, holding court at the piano in the Groucho private members' club in Soho, singing along to Dusty Springfield, or charging around festivals with her girlfriends. "Don't go in there, Mum!" she'd yell, every time Christine went to check if there was anything in the fridge. After Caroline died, an accountant said most of her outgoings were on McDonald's and parking tickets.
With fame came scrutiny about her love life. There were rumours about Prince Harry, which she always denied, and in 2011 she briefly dated the One Direction star Harry Styles, who was 17 to her 31. Columnists called her a "me-first cougar", people yelled "paedophile" at her in the street, and One Direction fans launched brutal online attacks. "Until this point I'd been comfortable in my own skin," she wrote in her memoir. "I never really had any doubts or insecurities about myself. Then I actually started questioning who I really was. Am I fat? Am I old? Am I wrinkly? Am I ugly? And that was awful."
Break-ups, when they came, were tough. "For nearly two years I was emotionally dead," she wrote about her break-up with Dave Danger, the drummer for the indie band the Holloways. They were together for three years, then "on and off" for two more — Caroline's longest romantic relationship.
But it was always work that got her through, particularly live TV, which was so adrenaline-fuelled and all-consuming that everything else dropped away. "Usually she could see a way out — she'd get up, go to work, do, do, do," Christine says. "This time there was nothing for her to get up for." Shortly after Caroline was arrested she "stepped down" from her role on the ITV2 show Love Island, according to the official announcement. But Christine says she was "taken off" by the channel. "It was not voluntary," she says. "ITV asked her to step down and she didn't have a choice. After that, they didn't help her, she didn't really hear from them."
The channel cannot comment on the medical support offered to an individual. "Everyone at ITV is absolutely devastated and still trying to process this tragic news," said Kevin Lygo, the director of television at ITV, at the time. "After Caroline stepped down from the show ITV made it clear that the door was left open for her to return and the Love Island production team remained in regular contact with her and continued to offer support over the last few months … We will all miss her very much."
Did Christine hear from the channel after her death? "No, I never did. I heard from the people who worked with her directly on Love Island and the crew have been amazing to me, but not ITV, I haven't ever heard from them."
The weekend before Caroline died she went for a walk and a roast with Christine and Christine's partner. A few days later Caroline was told the criminal case against her would go ahead and she would have to go to court, which would mean that the bodycam footage would probably come out.
"Then she found out her boyfriend [Burton] had sent that picture [of the blood-stained sheets] to his ex-girlfriend, and it was sold to the paper," Christine says, repeating a claim she made at the inquest. That night Caroline tried to take her life, but her friends found her and called an ambulance. She refused to go to hospital, worried about the incident becoming public. She could not be detained under the Mental Health Act because she was coherent and in her own home. The following morning, on February 15, in the time between her friends leaving the house and her sister arriving, she took her own life. "Jody found her. That's with her for ever," Christine says.
When Christine arrived at Caroline's flat, hours later, she was held back. "The police said, 'You can't touch her, you can't go near her!' There must be a better way of handling that," Christine says. "It was dreadful. Just dreadful. I lose words for [the Met]."
At first she says there was a strange sense of relief, "that we didn't have to worry about the worst thing happening [Caroline taking her own life] because it had happened ... Then the reality of it hits you. And then what do you do?"
"My heart is broken," Burton wrote shortly after her death. "I love you with all my heart." He is now expecting his first child with his girlfriend, Lottie Tomlinson, sister of the One Direction singer Louis.
At the inquest in August 2020 the coroner, Mary Hassell, said: "[Caroline] had struggles in the past and, in spite of the fact she may have led — to some — what might have been a charmed life, actually the more famous she got, the more some of these difficulties increased as she had to cope with the media in a way most of us don't. When things went wrong for her … she didn't have any privacy. I find the reason for her taking her life was she now knew she was going to be prosecuted for certain, and she knew she would face the media, the press, the publicity — it would all come down on her."
The question being asked today is whether the charge should have been pursued in the first place. Lisa Ramsarran, prosecutor for the CPS, told the inquest she was satisfied Burton's head injury was "at the top end of what you might see". Hassell responded: "I'm really struggling to understand how this injury was regarded as significant." A picture of Burton taken after the incident showed only a small cut.
"I don't think she should have had special treatment for who she was," Christine says, "but she shouldn't have had worse treatment. For something so minor [the argument with Burton] they should have sent her home and talked to her the next day, but they put her in a cell and charged her with assault."
In March 2021 the Met told Christine it was satisfied with its response and handling of the case, but in August she asked the IOPC to review it. "Following a review, the IOPC agreed with the Met that service was acceptable in relation to seven areas of the complaints relating to the response and handling of the incident by the Met," a Met spokesperson said.
The IOPC has directed the Met to reinvestigate two further areas of the case, both relating to the decision to appeal the CPS decision to caution Caroline. An update on that reinvestigation is expected soon.
"There is nothing I can do for Carrie now," Christine says, "but I can still fight for her."
Christine feels Caroline "everywhere, everywhere!" she says, smiling. "I see signs, signs in everything — it's a sign!" she says, mocking herself, laughing at the ridiculousness of it, not quite believing that she is a parent who has buried a child who was known for living life so fully. "Something funny will happen, like a bird will poo on us when we're having lunch outside, and you think, 'Ah. There she is.' She is everywhere."
Written by: Megan Agnew
© The Times of London
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