In the five years since Caroline Flack’s suicide, she has been immortalised as the poster victim of modern celebrity. Her death has become a tragic parable about cancel culture, responsible use of social media, the intrusion of the tabloid press, the sensation of reality TV and the misunderstandings and stigmas about mental ill health, from which we were all supposed to learn and in which each of us who watched on as voyeurs was complicit. It was shocking, incredibly sad, and uncomfortably novel: the death of a famous person about which members of the public felt guilt – and still do.

What I, at least, had forgotten, was just how quickly it all happened. On the 13 of December 2019, Flack was arrested and charged with assault by beating, after she and her boyfriend Lewis Burton had got int

See Full Page