The details of Peaches Geldof’s tragic death have been pored over by all and sundry in the hours since the inquest - and now it seems everyone feels entitled to an opinion on the matter. Piers Morgan tweeted overnight that the buck starts with Peaches’ mother Paula Yates, who died under similar circumstances in 1999, when Peaches was 11: ‘So much viciousness towards Peaches. If you want someone to ‘blame’ then start with her mother.’
Katie Hopkins also weighed in with a argument that if this were to happen to someone without the apparent cushion of celebrity, we'd be fuming. ‘If a young mum on benefits died, leaving her baby alone for 17 hours, she would be torn apart in the press.’
Peaches’ older sister, Fifi Geldof, has also been alarmed by some of the ‘viciousness’ that Piers noticed - albeit handling it in a more mature way. During an argument on her Instagram page, a user told her: ‘Think people are more annoyed at how she portrayed her life for her kids but was selfish to use drugs in front of them. Selfish and sad. Poor boys.’
Fifi responded: ‘You’ve no idea what you’re talking about quite frankly. Yet another who has bought into the bullshit. I’d appreciate you getting the fuck off my page with stuff like that on today of all days.’
Fifi’s right, not just in this case, but in all cases of tutting over-familiarity via social media. After Peaches’ death, we all flocked to the soonest social media outlet to express an outpouring of grief over what had happened(yes, some people made jokes, but we’d like to think that they’re not the sorts who would be reading this site). But as much as social media has become a place where we grieve, it’s not the place where we should hash out opinions on the coroner's report or draw clues as to what happened in the lead up to Peaches’ death.
A photo of Peaches and Paula, which she uploaded to Instagram the night before her death, has widely been used to indicate that the 25-year-old’s demise was a case of history repeating itself, a case of the Geldof Curse. This has been refuted by the professionals employed to find out the cause of her death. Roger Hatch, the coroner at Gravesend Coroner’s Court, said: ‘It is said it is a case of history repeating itself but this is not entirely so.’
He continued, pointing out that Peaches’ death was due to returning to heroin after not taking it for a while: ‘Deaths commonly occur in people who have previously been tolerant and have returned to using heroin.' With an ultimate verdict of a drug-related death, no-one could explain why Peaches – who had been on methadone for two and a half years before her death – had returned to it: ‘For reasons we will never know, prior to her death she returned to taking heroin.’
Even though we might have felt that we grew up with Peaches as we followed her trajectory from a surly red-carpet dwelling wild-child to a more settled mother, living out her days in an idyllic hippie-meets-Boden catalogue of Valencia-filtered Instagram photos, we didn’t. And, as the coroner’s report shows, even those who did will never know exactly what led her to her final moments.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.