- As well as fighting heroin addiction, Peaches was also hooked on diet pills
- Friends say she had been in and out of rehab several times
- Claims she was under massive financial pressure
- Had little contact with her father Bob Geldof in the months leading to her death
- Said she had a 'growing obsession' with her mother Paula Yates' death
Peaches was looking frail and thin in the months leading up to her death
For
someone whose early years were so blighted by tragedy and loss, it is
perhaps no surprise that Peaches Geldof was determined to create a
picture-perfect home life for herself.
Along
with her handsome musician husband, and two gorgeous young sons, she
enjoyed the £1 million country retreat in which she lovingly cooked
meals on the Aga, while their muddy dogs Bogwot and Parper lolled at her
feet.
And
there was no doubting her love for her children. She was, after all, a
huge advocate of so-called Attachment Parenting which, she said, meant
her sons Astala, two, and Phaedra, one, spent virtually every hour of
the day with her.
But,
as was so often the case with poor Peaches, the carefully crafted image
she sold to herself, as much as to the outside world, was in sharp
contrast to the sad reality of her troubled existence.
Friends
of the late 25-year-old TV presenter say that she was not only still
fighting an addiction to heroin that, it was revealed this week, played a
part in her death, but was also hooked on diet pills.
Partly
fuelling these dependencies, they say, were the money troubles she was
struggling with. She and her musician husband of two years, Tom Cohen,
were said to have faced the prospect of having to sell their home to
fund their costly lifestyle.
Friends say that Peaches had been in and out of rehab for several years - all of which was carefully hidden from the public.
Indeed,
this week it was claimed that in the days before her death, Peaches was
secretly attending a drug treatment clinic close to her home in the
Kent village of Wrotham, where she would arrive in a hoodie to collect
prescriptions for the heroin substitute Methadone.
A bleak picture is emerging of how her life had spiralled out of control in recent months, as she fell back into addiction.
‘Peaches
was up and down like a yo-yo with heroin,’ said Gerry Agar, a long-time
family friend of the Geldofs. Miss Agar, who used to act as Paula
Yates’s PR representative, added: ‘When she got married to Tom and had
her babies, we all hoped that things would get better and they did - for
a while.
'As far as I am concerned, some of her so-called friends were little more than facilitators.’
This week, detectives said they were hunting the drug dealer who supplied Peaches with heroin.
After
a period where she was seemingly free from drugs, Peaches had, at some
point, catastrophically, relapsed. Certainly, she had been the picture
of radiant good health when she and Tom married in September 2012, but
soon after Phaedra’s birth in April last year friends noticed she’d
begun to look thin and hollow-eyed.
One
of the cast of television reality show Made In Chelsea claims that she
witnessed Peaches openly snorting cocaine at a film premiere in London
last year.
Later, pictures of her on holiday with Cohen in Mauritius showed her growing baby bump in stark contrast to her thin limbs.
Clearly,
she was in desperate need of help. But, according to those who knew
her, Peaches’ problems had been greatly exacerbated in recent months by
mixing hard drugs with strong diet pills.
Peaches and her musician Tom Cohen, pictured
with their sons Phaedra, left and Astala, right were said to have faced
the prospect of having to sell their home to fund their costly lifestyle
Certainly, in the family pictures she posted of herself in the days before she died, Peaches looked markedly gaunt in the face.
One
close friend said: ‘She wasn’t eating and she was taking diet pills,
which gave her a buzz. Some people say the pills give you a similar
boost to “speed”, and it got to the stage where she was taking them to
give her the energy just to get up with the kids in the morning after
she’d been up using heroin the night before.
‘The whole thing was horrible and a disaster.’
Cohen
discovered the body of his wife at the family home at the beginning of
last month. This week, an inquest heard he had been spending the weekend
with the children at the home of his parents in South-East London.
Tom’s father, Keith, had delivered Phaedra back to Peaches on the Sunday
evening before she died.
The following day, Tom and his mother, Sue, went to check up on Peaches after being unable to contact her and found her dead.
Yesterday,
a spokesman for Kent Police confirmed that officers had seized drugs
paraphernalia found in the house on April 7, but added: ‘I would like to
make it clear that Thomas Cohen is not in any way under suspicion of
any involvement in Peaches Geldof-Cohen’s death or our concurrent
investigation into the supply of drugs.
Peaches, a huge advocate of so-called Attachment
Parenting meant her sons Astala and Phaedra, pictured, spent virtually
every hour of the day with her
‘He has not been arrested or interviewed under caution and there is no plan to do so.’
Friends say that Peaches recently felt under enormous pressure because of her and her husband’s financial worries.
Peaches
had found herself as the only breadwinner since Cohen’s band broke up
last year. Since then, he’s been essentially unemployed. Friends say
Tom, who’ll be 24 at the end of this month, has been trying to get a
vintage clothes shop in London off the ground with his older sister,
Holly.
This
meant that sometime TV presenter and magazine columnist Peaches was
carrying the burden of providing for her family, regularly travelling
into town in a bid to kick-start her own career, having meetings with
prospective employers, going to fashion events and generally trying to
keep her name in the public eye.
But
she had found work hard to come by and was attempting to reinvent her
public image as an outspoken earth mother. In a sign of how sharply her
star had fallen, her final interview was with the little-known Aga
Living magazine, run by the cooker company.
She regularly left the children with Tom’s parents, Keith, a social worker, and Sue, an artist, usually for three days a week.
Yet,
despite having this support network, Peaches is said to have felt
overwhelmed by the responsibility of trying to keep the young family she
adored afloat.
When
they were at home together, Peaches would insist that, as part of the
attachment parenting programme, she would sleep in one room with one of
the boys while Tom would settle down in the spare room with the other.
Attachment parenting also advises mothers to breastfeed their children
for longer than the usual guidelines.
Peaches, left, spent her life mythologising her mother, Paula Yates, right, and her death said one friend
Friends
say she was loath to ask for help from her father, multi-millionaire
Live Aid founder Bob Geldof, and that the pair had had little contact in
the months before her death.
Indeed,
in an interview two months before she died, Peaches claimed her father
had barely seen her two boys, saying: ‘It really is his loss to be
honest. He will regret it one day.’
The
distance between them also meant that, crucially, Geldof was not able
to intervene to force Peaches to get proper help, as he had done in the
past.
When
Peaches was younger, Geldof was often painted as a somewhat absent
father who refused to face up to his daughter’s growing problems.
True,
he did let the 15-year-old Peaches live with her sisters, Fifi and
Pixie, in a self-contained flat below the South London apartment he
shared at the time with fiancee Jeanne Marine and his adopted daughter,
Tiger Lily.
But
a source who worked closely with Peaches told me that, unbeknown to the
media, the Boomtown Rats frontman remained devoted to his daughter and
insisted on several occasions that Peaches should get specialist
treatment.
‘When
she was younger, Bob would let her get on with it until something
serious happened, then he would get very proactive and read her the riot
act and arrange for her to go into clinics,’ the source said.
Friends say that Bob Geldof, had had little contact with daughter Peaches in the months before her death
While
the family was keen to keep Peaches’ drug problems out of the public
eye, this sometimes proved impossible. In the summer of 2008, paramedics
were called after Peaches collapsed at the flat she shared with friends
in London’s King’s Cross amid reports that she had taken an overdose.
And
in 2011, an 18-year-old friend, privately-educated Freddy McConnel,
died of a heroin overdose in the summer after writing in his diary:
‘Peaches is coming over later and I am going to inject for the first
time. Perhaps I will die. I hope I don’t.’
Around
the same time, Gerry Agar says a musician came to visit her son Tom, a
close friend of Peaches from their schooldays. She heard the musician
on the phone arranging with Peaches to collect some cocaine from her and
insisted he leave.
‘During
that time, there were a number of rehab and treatment centres she was
admitted to that the public never found out about,’ she added.
For
more than two years before her death, Geldof had been a peripheral
figure in the life of his daughter. According to Gerry Agar, they became
distant in recent months, partly over Peaches’ insistence on talking
about her dead mother, Paula, in virtually every interview she gave.
‘Bob
didn’t like it. He didn’t think it was healthy,’ Miss Agar said. ‘It
infuriated him and that was the main bone of contention. But Peaches
basically told her father: “You can’t tell me what to do.” ’
Peaches was said to have felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of trying to keep the young family she adored afloat
Certainly,
Geldof was not the only one who was concerned about his daughter’s
growing obsession with Paula Yates, the former television presenter who
died of a heroin overdose aged 41 in September 2000.
On
the day of her own death, Peaches, who was 11 when Miss Yates died, had
posted a picture of herself as a young girl with her late mother on her
Twitter page.
Many of those who knew Peaches believe that her obsession with her late mother had fatal consequences.
‘Peaches
spent her life mythologising her mother and her death,’ says one
friend. ‘When she spoke about Paula and the way she died, it was with a
sense of awe. She felt her mother was a member of this very
rock ’n’ roll club of famous people who lived fast and died young.’
Gerry
Agar says: ‘Peaches was still in touch with a few of Paula’s old
friends and I think that they helped to create an idealised picture of
Paula in Peaches’ mind.
‘And
it was very hard for Peaches to try to live up to the image of Paula,
whom she was constantly told was so beautiful, talented and successful.
‘She
was always told how alike they were, but Peaches knew she couldn’t
compete. Peaches created this fantasy world about how her childhood with
Paula was so idyllic, but I was there and it wasn’t.
‘Because
Paula was a drug addict, a lot of Peaches’ early life was traumatic. It
was not pleasant. But she was very like Paula in that they were both
fantasists to some extent.’
Very
sadly for the troubled Peaches, the fairytale world she attempted to
construct for herself was, in the end, not enough to keep the demons of
her past away.
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