Where Media Speculation Goes Too Far: Peaches Geldof, Celebrity and Tragedy

A couple of days ago, English writer, television presenter, and model Peaches Geldof was found dead in her home at the age of twenty-five. The cause of death is as yet unknown, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of incredibly inappropriate media speculation and hinting. It’s symptomatic of a weirdly possessive public claim on the lives of famous people. Add in a good chunk of that most popular of narratives, the downfall of a pretty young woman, to borrow from Karen Joy Fowler. And don’t forget, while you’re at it, the hunger for other people’s tragedies.

The thing is, of course Ms Geldof’s death was always going to be major news, because of her own work, because her father is musician and activist Bob Geldof, and because her mother, fellow television presenter and writer Paula Yates, famously died of a heroin overdose, to name a few elements of their family history. There’s nothing to stoke the tabloid fires quite like an intergenerational family tragedy, and so Hollywood Life let rip with the headline “Peaches Geldof Found Dead — Did She Die From A Drug Overdose?”  The article heavily implies that Ms Geldof died from an overdose, of course, adding bits of non-evidence such as the fact that she had a friend who used drugs and Twitter users’ messages that mention the word ‘drugs’. The Mirror is pointing to bulimia. News.com.au, meanwhile, wants you to know that “Peaches Geldof was warned “juicing diet could cause death”.

The direction being headed in here, then, has two streams. One, Peaches’ death is supposedly inevitable, part of some kind of ‘curse of the Geldof clan’ (an actual quote from that last article). Two, her death is shaping up to be supposedly her fault because people have decided it was caused by things she was doing with her body that they didn’t think were right. She is, in short, being styled as a victim for whom we are supposed to have no sympathy.

If you’ve heard this one directed at young female celebrities before, so have we all, markedly when musician Amy Winehouse died in 2011. What we’ve actually heard from the Kent police, to quote their website, is ‘The death is being treated as a non-suspicious, but an unexplained sudden death’. There’s nothing to suggest any of the rubbish spouted above, and no one’s business if any of that is true. The appropriate way to respond – well, I’d give you an example, but I can’t find a single media source that has dealt with Ms Geldof’s death really well. The appropriate response to a death in which the public takes interest is to report the facts, centre the loved ones’ response or responses (but not to hound them for any), and not to centre that of the public, or celebrities, or people who really didn’t know the deceased person that well.

In short, if your reactions and speculations concerning an event or a loss are likely to be unnecessarily hurtful to those left behind, don’t express them. This has been your regular lesson in decency that is broadly targeted at media problems but is really applicable to all of us.

Gravestone photo by dynamosquito, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license