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Is it self selecting – the sort of needy skin deep people that crave to live in this world are the most vulnerable to it’s dark side.
Sad thing is that surveys of young people have this dross right up there in there career/life aspirations. It appears from the poor woman’s story it probably pays to be careful what your wish for.
This^^
It seems that every person under 30 years old craves attention like they are some sort of celebrity; silly pouting poses on Instagram and nonsensical musings on Facebook .. craving the likes etc.
It is very sad for any person to feel that killing themselves is the only way to end their misery. Ms Flack was a 40 year old woman who will have known the industry she was in well enough to know the tabloids would be reporting everything she did ... its all part and package of her part in UK celebrity.
A concern that has not been mentioned here within all the usual silly squabbling is that as a role model to many young girls/women. Ending her life as she did may influence others with mental illness and poor coping strategies to copy her.
* I am also old; never watched any of her programs ... but am aware of her. Pretty sure she had been on Celebrity Juice a few times.
RIP Caroline Flack
It seems that every person under 30 years old craves attention like they are some sort of celebrity;
* I am also old
Top legal bod on bbc breakfast this morning, explains the details of the case and how/why the decisions were made.
Also, it seems the main cause of her decision, was because she was terrified of the upcoming trial and how it could turn into a circus. This guy said that he had been involved in six previous trials in which people had taken their lives in the lead up and suggested that those taking the decision to prosecute, needed help too. What a mess!
Obviously, we don't want people killing themselves in fear of media intrusion, but we can't not have justice to avoid that either.
It really seems to be about a lack of support to a vulnerable person who should have been able to find a way out of the rabbit hole she chose to go down.
I'm not a fan of the idea of a privacy law as it would be abused by many, but we have to get a grip on the desire of a lot of the public to want to pry into things that are frankly none of their business, and stop the industry around that from existing
Nothing to add beyond a news article on the assault charge was on the first page of google results for me.
This guy said that he had been involved in six previous trials in which people had taken their lives in the lead up and suggested that those taking the decision to prosecute, needed help too.
In a previous role we would arrest people, do PACE interviews to gather evidence and then, unless they were completely exonerated there and then, we would do a recorded “suicide interview “ to ascertain their state of mind and detail organisations who could assist them so they didn’t kill themselves. This wasn’t at the behest of those who decide to prosecute, The CPS are far removed from most initial phases of the investigative process, overworked and a bit not fit for purpose at times, but a response to the high percentage of offenders offing themselves in this particular work stream. Unfortunately this step is resource intensive (for us, the custody suite staff and possibly the duty brief) and I am not aware of any evidence it works. We received no specific training just a pro forma to go through. Also some offended would just not engage - either through their own thought process or following on from legal advice - and this was offenders who tended not to be career criminals and almost always copped a plea. Trying to run mental health triage with normal criminal suspects - in the present circumstances it would be chaos and it’s not a job for investigators. The whole judicial and law enforcement system is borked and creaking - years of cuts coming home to roost.
50% of the population are statistically intellectually subnormal
50% are below average. Subnormal has a different meaning.
This guy said that he had been involved in six previous trials in which people had taken their lives in the lead up and suggested that those taking the decision to prosecute, needed help too. What a mess!
Not sure what exactly your trying to say.
Are you saying the CPS shouldn't prosecute people if that might affect their mental health? Or that the CPS are psychopaths incapable of feeling guilt even if they've not done anything wrong?
We'll probably get more details this week once the CPS makes the evidence public but it seems she hit him with / threw something at him that then required him to go to hospital. And then like a lot of domestic violence cases he didn't want to support the prosecution.
What if hypothetically it had been the other way around and we were discussing a person killed by a violent partner that hadn't been prosecuted because the victim didn't want to support the prosecution?
Compare and contrast these events with Ant McParlane.
Both celebs that made high profile "errors" One was given time to sort themselves out. One was hounded to their death.
But then, only one of them was a woman.
I don't think gender is an issue in that regard, it's about revenue generation. I would argue that the duo are a bigger earner for ITV than Ms. Flack. Got to protect those assets, right?
So it's likely the same machine that kicked in to insulate Schofield from the rumours circulating most likely kicked into to protect Ant and left the asset with the most liability in the cold.
Makes it no less ****ing tragic though.
Compare and contrast these events with Ant McParlane.
Both celebs that made high profile “errors” One was given time to sort themselves out. One was hounded to their death.
By the press perhaps, but he was still prosecuted.
Epstein?
I don’t think gender is an issue in that regard, it’s about revenue generation. I would argue that the duo are a bigger earner for ITV that Ms. Flack. Got to protect those assets, right?
Don't think ITV was the problem.
I was pretty shocked by this news then saddened that a young person felt the only way out of this mess was to take their own life. Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned about things but why did the boyfriend feel the need to go and report this to the police knowing full well that it would open a massive can of worms. Why not just Man up and walk away.
I do. We've seen the PR machines kick in insulate celebs before. They have a huge part in steering column inches. She was left exposed and got absolutely hammered, the rags led the way, the mouth-breathers followed and piled-on.
Compare and contrast these events with Ant McParlane.
Both celebs that made high profile “errors” One was given time to sort themselves out. One was hounded to their death.
Ant had long-running substance abuse issues which culminated in drink-driving and legal bother IIRC. I believe he then did a tell-all in exchange for favourable coverage and things being couched in the usual "prescription drug addiction" BS terms.
Industry talk is that he shouldn't have been allowed to continue partying so hard for so long, but there wasn't really an effective support network around him.
Things could have ended differently for him TBH, but he probably had more support in the end because he's massively more successful and a mainstay of Saturday night TV. Not because he's a bloke.
I don’t think gender is an issue in that regard, it’s about revenue generation. I would argue that the duo are a bigger earner for ITV than Ms. Flack. Got to protect those assets, right?
There may be some truth in that, but there is an entire section of the tabloid industry that seems to be devoted to building up and then tearing down women. The "sidebar of shame" is almost exclusively stories about female celebrities, its completely toxic.
Anyway RIP. I hope some change is brought about by this death but I won't be holding my breath.
Why not just Man up and walk away.
Because they both required hospital treatment after the assault.
Compare and contrast these events with Ant McParlane.
Both celebs that made high profile “errors” One was given time to sort themselves out. One was hounded to their death.
But then, only one of them was a woman.
I dont think sex, gender or race came into this, I think she simply had fallen into the spotlight trap of surrounding herself with the wrong people who then when needed to be friends were not.
This seems to happen to everyone that finds the spotlight such as footballers or actors etc
Not sure what exactly your trying to say.
Are you saying the CPS shouldn’t prosecute people if that might affect their mental health? Or that the CPS are psychopaths incapable of feeling guilt even if they’ve not done anything wrong?
Well, if I've not been very clear....I'm saying that when something like this happens, you hear all the various details from all the different sides and realise its a mess and even in hindsight, you can see it would be difficult to stop things escalating.
Before this happened, I had little sympathy for her as, she's clearly made things difficult for herself. 'Dating' a 17 year old Harry Styles, her ex fiance making public statements about her violent behaviour, and then smashing a lamp over the head of her sleeping boyfriend....all of which suggests that she was 'troubled'. All rather tragic really!
@richmtb totally agree mate, I think it's sickening that to stay 'safe' women have to court those who look for the stories.
It's deal with the devil and eventually he comes for your soul, dragging all the mouth-breathers who hoover that shit up along with them for the feast.
But it's supply and demand, regulating the messenger isn't going to stop the demand. You'll just see more bullshit flying around social media, if that's even possible.
Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned about things but why did the boyfriend feel the need to go and report this to the police knowing full well that it would open a massive can of worms. Why not just Man up and walk away.
For whatever reason (and this may change depending on which version of events you read) the police were called at the time of the incident, not a post incident call to the police to report an issue.
For a moment, let's take the fact it was a well known celebrity out of the equation. In terms of the court case, 'manning up and walking away' is exactly what the DV law is designed to prevent right? I.e. in a genuine case of domestic abuse, it ensures that the victim is not cowed into not pressing charges if there is a case to answer. If the accused did not have a case to answer, then one would hope that this would play out in court and they would be cleared. Alternatively if the full evidence warranted prosecution, then so be it.
All this aside, the way in which the media are allowed to bully people on the tenuous idea that if they earn money from being in the spotlight, then anything is fair game, is disgusting. The red tops are already creating huge amounts of click bait on sympathy articles, which given what they were publishing only a few days ago, is incredibly disingenuous. Sadly I can't see any real lasting changes being made.
@Rockape63 it is isn't it. It would be good if we viewed all those who commited these sorts of offences as 'troubled' but we usually default to 'burn them'. It is interesting to see how many are trying to explain away her 'alleged' offences, fair amount of deflection going on. That isn't a MRA slant, just an observation. Just shows the hypocrisy and bias we all have.
But maybe that links to the failures you've touched in and the secret Barrister goes into at length. There's very little rehabilitation in the criminal justice system.
It's why reoffending rates are so high, which you obviously deal with quite regularly I'd imagine. The system is broken.
Then when it goes slightly wonky the knives come out , and the backlash is expotential , a public person is available online for direct , pretty much unmoderated, comments which ,as we like to say on here – What has been read cannot be unread
This is the difference now. Reality TV and celeb culture have been around a while, I remember all the 'Nasty Nick' stuff in the press, but now you have a screen in your hand 24/7 full of abuse and death threats. Must be a nightmare.
@Jamze trudat. I scrolled through Facebook wish morning, first notification was a mate giving me shit with some funny meme.
He obvs got it back, I couldn't imagine scrolling through messages of hate and bile, my newsfeed and timeline full of shit stories about me.
Crushing is the word, I can see why higher profile celebs have SM managers who take care of that for them.
If you flip the genders I don't think a man would have had an easier ride. Shagging a 17yr old when you are 31 and charged with beating your sleeping partner would arguably have made you more of a public pariah as a man than as a woman.
Absolutely factual @convert. We should rightly not be impressed with anyone carrying on in this manner, to do otherwise does a disservice to victims. But we could and should temper that displeasure.
But social media gives a voice to everyone, all thinking in isolation not thinking about the effect it will have.
Ironically seeing it on twitter threads today about her death, the bile and vitriol. People are ****ing stupid.
I scrolled through Facebook wish morning, first notification was a mate giving me shit with some funny meme.
He obvs got it back, I couldn’t imagine scrolling through messages of hate and bile, my newsfeed and timeline full of shit stories about me.
I guess it is how you manage it. I know personally one relatively famous person to call a friend (rather than just know them). He has insta, twitter and facebook accounts as his known name but much of the feed for that is managed by other people or he does it when he has his work head on. All the accounts for those profiles go to his work phone. Then he has a separate personal phone and entirely separate social media accounts using his nickname and it's only friends that use that. That is the phone he looks at over coffee in the morning. He is pretty grounded with a brain and a great family which I guess helps him to keep it all in proportion.
If you flip the genders I don’t think a man would have had an easier ride.
Derek Mackay, MSP.
beating your sleeping partner would arguably have made you more of a public pariah as a man than as a woman.
Sir Geoffrey Boycott, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, Jonny Depp etc may disagree
All the accounts for those profiles go to his work phone. Then he has a separate personal phone and entirely separate social media accounts using his nickname and it’s only friends that use that. That is the phone he looks at over coffee in the morning. He is pretty grounded with a brain and a great family which I guess helps him to keep it all in proportion.
Your friend sounds extremely grounded. Even if you did employ a social media manager and keep accounts and phones separate, it must be so tempting to search for yourself and see it all anyway. And some celebs make a point that it is them rather than just PR (@wossy, @stephenfry etc.)
Thought it was pretty bad her management company joined in with the finger-pointing yesterday. You'd think they'd be urgently reviewing how they look after their clients instead.
How sad
I can’t understand why you are all so interested
People will have lots of reasons. For me, it's all a bit too close to home for comfort.
I’d just ask that anyone who doesn’t have a clue who she is, please keep your posts short and snappy. Some of us who knew who she was might not be able to handle a reply longer than a tweet or instagram.
I think it was me that started that; sorry if my ignorance offends in some way, but it was an honest point. I simply didn't know who she was, 48 hrs on and I've had a bit of a google and watched some news reports... Turns out we were pretty much the same age which makes it even stranger I wasn't aware of her. I suppose I have my own little media bubble like anyone else, it's not a badge of honour or anything, there are plenty of famous people I have no knowledge of, we live in a world with too many "Celebrities" some of them are bound to pass a few of us by...
Anyway that lack of awareness perhaps gives me a different perspective on her death and a few things have struck me about the whole sad event.
There's lots of blame being slung about, for "The Media" and for "Social Media" primarily coming from various forms of media and social media...
I can't help wondering how sincere some (most) of these outpourings really are, and how keen some are to get ahead of some of their own bad press by jumping on the grief bandwagon.
Her employers, ITV (a media organisation oddly enough) didn't really seem to know her in any real sense.
Every news bulletin they seemed to recite the same facts (the assault case, her "fragile state", unnamed friends that said 'this or that', the CPS wanted a "show trial"... etc, etc) they read out a few of her tweets, but honestly I get the impression that she went on an enforced break from work, and nobody from the office actually bothered to call her because she was gaining attention for the 'wrong reasons'...
Nobody seems to be acknowledging the audiences role in all of this really either. If people didn't lap all this insta-celeb, no privacy for the famous, shite up, and share their insightful comments on Twitter/FB it wouldn't make the news or crappy magazines/papers, fuelling yet more twitter blurb and leading to the sort of media led, troll stoked backlash that not everyone is equipped to endure...
The other thing that my missus pointed out to me was that gender almost certainly played a part.
Women in the public eye still seem to held to a "higher standard". not just the dissection of their looks, makeup, clothing but also their behaviour and their private lives... She noted that Dec (that's the right one I think) of Ant & Dec was "dealing with his issues" through the medium of drink driving about a year ago, and a few weeks ago received some sort of telly award, his indiscretions seem to have been far more easily forgiven and forgotten by the Meeja lovies and the gawping public, would that have been the case if he'd been a woman?
Either way a woman has had her private life spill over into her very public professional career, and then been bullied and ostracised to the point of suicide. The general response seems to be assigning blame and a general lack of real introspection...
Sir Geoffrey Boycott, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, Jonny Depp etc may disagree
Depp lost Pirates of the Caribbean and he was the one being beaten.
I can’t understand why you are all so interested
As a father of a teenage daughter who worries about what people say about her on social media i'm quite interested.
I also liked Caroline Flack - very sad turn of events.
I don't know much about Caroline Flack but I will make the following points:
- It's easier to blame others than accept personal blame (Media and their readers).
- There is a good reason for victimless prosecution in cases of domestic violence. It is rarely the first case of violence that is reported, and one or more people are vulnerable and potentially at serious risk (as murder statistics will attest) of violence or intimidation. Where there is sufficient evidence to go to trial it is absolutely the correct thing to charge a suspect. Cps et al are being lashed out at as scapegoats when they've done nothing wrong. If she has smashed a vase over the head of her sleeping partner, as I has been suggested, that suggests that she was potentially a high risk. The consequences of such actions could have been serious injury or death on another occasion? If it wasn't an attractive female celebrity the reaction to the charge and her suicide would be very different in my opinion... To change from a system of victimless prosecution and positive action would lead to huge numbers of the most vulnerable in society being subject to further abuse and risk. The issue here is perhaps how appropriate it is for the media to report on unproven allegations?
- Her death is very sad. Suicide is terrible and leaves a massive hole in the life of those around them. My opinion is that mental heath or substance abuse is likely to have played a part (purely on the basis that suicide is linked to both - I have no knowledge of any issues). Nobody really knows what help or support was there for her, whether she had hidden any issues, etc. We can't judge what we don't know - there may have been a significant amount there?
Let's wait on facts before jumping on any bandwagons, eh? The sad thing is that next week she'll be old news to the tabloids and her 'fans' and it will just be her family and friends left dealing with it all...
Just been over to the homepage of the Sun.
9 out of the first 20 articles are about Caroline Flack or related to her suicide.
As mentioned above, the articles harassing her have been hidden or deleted.
We were talking at work the other day about just how terribly dated the film Goldeneye was (Freelance computer nerds manipulating defunct Russian cold war hardware for financial gain being the new great threat to global security).
And in contrast, how Tomorrow Never Dies was actually a cautionary tale (media mogul causes death and destruction to create stories and increase ratings)
Just been over to the homepage of the Sun.
I removed all of the red tops, Daily Mail, etc. from my news feeds this morning. Fed up with it, don't know why I didn't do it years ago.
@slimboyjim you asked people to wait on facts, after doing the exact opposite in the preceding paragraphs?