The Lonesome Death of Caroline Flack
Gossip is a pretty simple process.
Entity A aims to entertain Entity B by saying something unflattering about Entity C.
Mostly it’s good clean fun, the equivalent of ratting out a coworker about her secret new boyfriend.
Over the weekend, across the pond, we were reminded it has a tragic extreme.
Entity A in this case were several British tabloid newspapers, most prominently The Sun.
Entity B was a chunk of the British public.
Entity C was Caroline Flack, 40, a hostess, judge and occasional contestant on British competition and reality TV shows.
On Dec. 13, Flack was arrested by Crown Police at the $1.4 million flat she shared with her boyfriend Lewis Burton, 27. Prosecutors later said he called 9–9–9, Britain’s 9–1–1, and said his girlfriend hit him with a lamp while he was sleeping.
Burton subsequently backpedaled, saying they had a row, but no lamp was involved.
The crown still pressed charges, setting a trial date for March 4 and forbidding Flack, who pled not guilty, from contacting Burton.
Burton took to Instagram to say he was “gutted” that he had to spend Christmas without Flack, whom he called the most amazing person he ever met.
On Christmas Eve, The Sun ran a front-page headline quoting the prosecutor’s assertion that Burton told 9–9–9, “She Tried To Kill Me.”
A week later, The Sun ran a front-page picture of Flack’s rumpled bed with bright red stains, headlined “Bedroom Bloodbath.” It said the blood was Burton’s.
Two days later Burton said the blood was Flack’s, because she cut her hand.
By this time Flack had lost her $1.5-million gig hosting a new season of ITV’s lowbrow romance/reality show Love Island, and she had almost terminated her lively social media presence. Her postings became abstract, punctuated with lines like “Be nice to people” and “Be kind.”
Fast-forward to Valentine’s day, The Sun ran a long story about a “Valentine” marketed by an artist who specializes in crude cards. This one had a drawing of Flack with the caption, “I’ll — — ing Lamp You.”
Didn’t say he was clever. Just crude.
The Sun story professed righteous outrage that someone would be so callous, thereby dusting off one of the oldest tricks in the tabloid playbook: To prove how much we condemn anyone who would market something like this, we’re going to run a huge picture of it!
The day after Valentine’s Day, Entity C killed herself.
Britain exploded in fury, much of it directed at The Sun.
By that time The Sun had deleted the Valentine’s card story from its website and Sun executive editor Dan Wootton had written a column blaming the police and ITV for Flack’s death, saying she was in despair because no one seemed to afford her the presumption of innocence.
You know, like The Sun had been doing.
Wootton also condemned the police and ITV for not being more sensitive to “a quite obviously highly vulnerable woman.”
You know, like The Sun had been.
“I am utterly distraught,” Wootton wrote. “Caroline has been a friend for many years.”
Touching. Now imagine how Wootton’s paper covers its enemies.
Truth is, there’s no defending The Sun here, unless it’s a defense to say the paper has reveled just as much in the troubles of countless other famous people.
Yet there’s also no way around this: While most of the British citizens condemning The Sun neither buy it nor savor its website, a measurable percentage of the population does.
If no one bought The Sun or clicked on its website, this line of “coverage” would stop tomorrow.
Entity A doesn’t care about Entity C. Entity C is just the shiny object that gets the attention of Entity B. If Entity C were no longer a shiny object, Entity A would replace it quicker than a paparazzi flash.
That, of course, isn’t happening. The Sun and its fellow tabloids long ago determined that a profitable chunk of readers in Britain, as in most of the world, loves to be entertained by the fortunes, or much better the misfortunes, of people they recognize from places like television.
Could the tabloids still cover celebrities and be more restrained? Sure. Are they operating now at the level their readers want? Probably.
Caroline Flack certainly knew the deal in the celebrity media game. The media got clicks, she got fame. It’s not the same artistic quest as reinventing Cordelia in King Lear, but it’s a lucrative gig if you’re one of the handful who can pull it off.
It’s easy, now that it’s too late, to see Flack had some of the insecurity that often quietly plagues publicly gregarious people. Just in general, it feels safe to say that people who commit suicide harbor demons.
That doesn’t explain why Caroline Flack killed herself. But it doesn’t seem unfathomable to suggest that in the end, Entity B felt she was only a pawn in their game.
