Caroline Flack was a Brit who lived in the public eye, working various TV and radio presenting gigs before being shot into the limelight when she landed the highly coveted job as the host of ITV2 hit show 'Love Island' back in 2015. Since then, her life became the subject of intense media interest, notably newspaper outlets such as red top tabloids The Sun and the Daily Mirror. With her career being constantly closely analysed by the watchful eyes of these journalists, it was practically just a matter of time before something caused her personal life to be flung into the mixture too.
That fateful moment came in December 2019, when news reports began to surface that Caroline had been involved in an incident with her boyfriend, Lewis Burton, and that she was being charged with assault, with the trial due to go ahead in March 2020. Now this is a particularly difficult situation for me to write about, because despite what keyboard warriors may say, the only people that truly knows what occurred during that incident are Caroline and Lewis themselves, and considering the present circumstances now it is likely we will never learn all of the details.
In the aftermath of these allegations, Caroline was relentlessly pursued by the media, journalists' mouths practically watering at the prospect of getting a juicy insider scoop on what was going on in her life. She stepped down as the host for the new upcoming 'Winter Love Island' series, and stepped back from social media. Personally I think that these were the right courses of action for her to take, because the allegations made against her were not something to be taken lightly; domestic abuse is a very serious subject matter, and if it were the other way round and it had been a man that was being accused for crimes against a woman, I could accurately predict that the media scrutiny would be much more brutal. However, without any confirmed and hard proof, and the fact that her boyfriend Lewis himself came out and said he wanted the whole thing to be done with, the media should not have went after her in the manner that they did.
On the 15th February 2020 Caroline Flack was found dead in her flat, at the young age of forty, with her whole life ahead of her, but having made the heartbreaking decision to take her own life. No one is asking you to consider her a good person, no one is trying to justify the decisions she made and the actions she took in her short life, and I am writing this with a fairly neutral outlook on the situation. But I think I speak for most when I say that everyone can agree the media's handling of the whole situation was wrong. And I don't just mean the newspapers that published cruel, sensationalised headlines and poked fun at her at a time when she was clearly struggling, but also just the regular internet trolls who waste no time jumping online onto the bandwagon of hate anytime a celebrity comes under scrutiny for anything. While it is perfectly okay to have an opinion on something, there is a fine line that is more often than not crossed, and people quickly change from just having an opinion to straight up being mean. Without getting too in-depth to the sorts of abuse that Caroline received, she was essentially called a variety of abusive names such as 'nonce', 'ugly' and 'slut', and hundreds of comments of 'You should kill yourself' flooded the comments section of her Instagram posts. Sadder still, it is these same trolls who leapt to their keyboards in the wake of her death, retweeting mental health posts and preaching at people to be kinder to one another. The internet is filled with faceless hypocrites, and its no wonder that sadly more and more deaths by suicide caused by anxiety and depression induced by social media are occurring not just in the UK, but globally.
Social media has been proven to cause a whole plethora of mental health problems, including anxiety, sleep problems and increased suicide risk, and this is undoubtedly caused by the constant need of reassurance that we seek online, for example, how we tend to psychologically feel good about ourselves if a selfie we post receives a good amount of engagement. We feel pressured in this day and age to always look good and stay in the good books of our followers, but one negative comment amongst a sea of positive ones will stick out like a sore thumb and we wrack ourselves with worry, pointing out every flaw we see within ourselves until insecurity riddles us. And in worst case scenarios, the routine of negativity takes its toll and people make impossible and irreversible choices that everyone else must live with the consequences of for the rest of their lives.
To conclude, I just want to acknowledge that this blog post has ended up more of a rant about the dark side of social media and its users rather than a well-written and articulate article about the death of a celebrity, and that's perfectly fine. I guess the whole point of this blog was to write about something that interested me after all, and its given me the chance to go on a rather lengthy rant about something that has always bothered me. Again, I am reiterating that it doesn't matter what you thought of Caroline Flack, what your opinion was of her or the many things she did with her life, all that matters is that someone's life was taken far too quickly at the hands of people who need to learn to practise what they preach and choose carefully what they choose to put online. I am going to end this post here and leave a screenshot of a post that Caroline shared to her Instagram just 2 months ago. Until next time, when hopefully I will be back with a less somber post.
Also, going to leave this number to Samaritans here, a charity that is always on call to listen to whatever you're currently going through and will help you as best they can, because you never know who needs it: 116 123
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