Caroline Flack’s mother Christine has admitted it “hurts” to see her fake friends talking about her on TV.
The beloved Love Island host was found dead at her home in London on February 15, 2020 at the age of 40, after she sadly took her own life.
During a new interview with The Sun, Caroline’s 71-year-old mum said: “It’s hard. I saw someone on the telly this week calling her a friend and it really hurt.”
“When a death is in the media, you can’t just grieve quietly. There’s lots of people grieving that don’t know her personally, so you’re looking after them, as well as all her friends.”
Christine also revealed she speaks to Caroline’s “really old, closest friends” all the time – including Dawn O’Porter, Natalie Pinkham, and Josie Naughton.
“Josie and Caroline met when they lived together in Camden, she met Dawn when she was presenting I’m A Celebrity: Extra Camp, and Natalie while working on a poker show. They’re the friends I knew,” she explained.
“I like seeing Natalie, Josie and Dawn, but it hurts sometimes when I have to see people who say they knew her.”
Caroline took her own life just hours after she was told she would face trial for the alleged assault of her then-boyfriend Lewis Burton – despite the fact that he didn’t want to press charges.
Following her death, the presenter’s management slammed the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for pursuing the “show trial”, knowing how vulnerable she was.
After Caroline’s death, her family released an unpublished Instagram post the presenter wanted to share before the died.
In the heartfelt statement, the TV star denied being a “domestic abuser”, and said the incident between her and Lewis was simply an “accident”.
During her chat with The Sun, Christine said: “I hate the memory of my daughter to be a negative one because she wasn’t negative.”
“She always saw the positive in something… she always tried to be a good role model, for young women especially. I want her to be remembered for these things.”
“Carrie suffered for a long while, but never showed it because her outgoing personality covered everything. Mainly she was happy, and funny, and brilliant. She just had these terrific down times, and not many people saw those down times”
“She hid it. The last doctor she saw thought she may have had bipolar. And that’s what I always thought. It was just constant highs, all of a sudden, then the lows,” she explained.
“Usually something would happen, but it would always eventually pass. I’ve slept so many times in her bed until the thing that was upsetting her passed. But she didn’t even have her own doctor.”
“She’d go to a doctor so that nobody read her files, you know; she was so ashamed of people thinking she had mental health problems.”
“She was just known as this happy-go-lucky girl; she was petrified of people seeing her dark side, and thinking she was ‘mental’. She wasn’t tragic – she had a wonderful life and I am so immensely proud of her,” Christine added.
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