Peaches Geldof

[Phil Anne Throw Pee]

This is probably unpopular, but I thought Paula Yates was an atrocious Mother, too interested in hooking up with Michael Hutchence than looking after her kids. I couldn't bear Peaches when she was alive but was very sad when she died - 25 is no age.

 

[AnnaBananaPie]

This is such an interesting thread. I’m not even sure why I’m so fascinated by it all, just her whole family history is so crazy

 

[emm]

I was a heroin addict for years. I did get clean when I was 19, but quickly relapsed. Nobody knew until I was 25. Honestly I was injecting and smoking heroin, behind my partners back, still working and still studying. You can be totally functional on it. Anybody you look at can be on it and you not realise. Fat, thin, poor, rich, CEOs, bar tenders, mothers in the playground, health care professionals. There is even a charity dedicated to helping drs go to rehab in secret, signed off for ‘stress’. I met an anaesthetist once and he used to use the ‘magic milk’ used after each operation. If you know how to inject properly, & you learn along the way, & needle exchanges are happy to help you (learn) if you rotate areas nobody will notice. Sometimes you will have bruising or swollen hands. Esp if you’ve been smoking crack and then try to inject you make a right mess of yourself. Peaches didn’t have tell tell signs of heroin addiction. Because we don’t all look the same. People do use heroin without being addicted too. I know many of people that only use on pay day for a treat. They are known as giro junkies. However, anybody can be using at any time. I think smoking it gives it away more because you’ll be off your head and end up with black all over your face by itching your nose or black on your front teeth. Btw I’m 4 years clean now. Was just giving my pearls of wisdom regarding peaches and her H use.

Ntothing to add to this as I have no idea about any of this, but well done for staying clean for so long, such an achievment

 

[Moobiemoo]

I read a lot of things about Paula and Michael, also seen all the documentaries about Michael as I was a big fan

My understanding was that Peaches had been hiding her drugs from Thomas in the house and going to meetings to get clean. He may well have not known exactly what she was doing but knew she was trying.

I really think Bob always struggled with his girls, he was not a traditional parent because by a young age they had already lived a showbiz whirlwind lifestyle and he was very distraught by his divorce and all that happened in the 2 years after it and losing Paula. I don’t think he dealt with his grief/anger very well. He was publicly blamed for decades for Michaels death by Michaels family. It very much ruined his career too. Bob was trying to stop Paula taking the girls out of school and moving to Australia to be with Michael on tour. Bob did not want them to go and both Paula and Michael were angry he had ruined their plans (by trying to keep them in school, and have a stable life). Paula did the same thing and died on Pixies 10th birthday, leaving Tiger alone in the house with her dead body.

I honestly can’t imagine how Peaches dealt with what happened in her early life and it is so sad she also became addicted to drugs but I don’t think it was suspicious

 

[Vanillaco]

I think this, in a way, is why people are so shocked by Peaches, as a mother of 2, being a heroin addict. Society expects mothers to put their children before themselves every second of every day & throw off any perceived self centred desires.
So people cannot conceive that actually as someone with childhood trauma who clearly struggled with life before children she was going to struggle with motherhood (especially with 2kids in a year) & turn to her old dysfunctional coping mechanisms.
Motherhood can be indescribably amazing but it can be dull, monotonous & so unbelievable exhausting. Realising what society’s expectations of you as a mother are & that they aren’t the same for fathers can be deflating & soul-destroying.
Peaches was clearly struggling with motherhood but instead of being able to freely admit it she felt compelled to tell all & sundry she was a purist parent.
The narrative around motherhood & the vastly lower standard expected of men needs to be changed.

Absolutely this. I was in my 30's when I had my children, had had an absolute blast in my 20's, had a good job and a house, marriage, did everything right and I found it bloody hard , boring and a huge shock to the system. The media portrays motherhood as some kind of higher calling and all mothers must be saints or sinners. The parenting 'experts' and celebs who are always the 'First Woman To Ever Give Birth' are complicit in this. The reality is an almighty shock to many.

 

[tarotbaby]

They would only have needed to tread very carefully if they were seeking to hide her drug use though. Perhaps they were and she knew that. Peaches, drug user though she was, due to her money and resources probably wouldn’t even have made the terrible parent list, in comparison to what social workers see in other families.

Social Worker here! She had a good support network, husband, family and friends, was a member of a mummy group, and was actively seen to be seeking help while holding down a job and was obviously devoted to her children. Her children were healthy and happy and were adored. We see much much worse cases of children living with drug addicts - and honestly, as awful as it sounds, she probably wasn’t even on the the social work dep radar.

 

[Gflo93]

I often think about Peaches Geldof, it’s such a waste of a life that she is gone. I think it’s because she was only a few years older than me and she seemed to have her whole life together, I was almost jealous of her lovely kids and her super cool husband. I remember where I was, on the bus, when the news about her death came through, and how shocked I was when the verdict came out that it was heroin.

Anyway, I’ve seen quite a few posts in these forums about her and the strange circumstances surrounding her passing. So I thought maybe I would make a thread for her.

There are a few weird rumours that I have seen on here: this blind which I really can’t believe is true at all?! I heard from a friend of a friend who went to school with Thomas Cohen that is is incredibly nice.

He Killed Her: Apparently, he confessed. He got drunk and confessed. He did so to the sister of the woman he killed who he was also sleeping with. He says he killed her because she was going to leave him and take the kids. So, since she already had issues with drugs, he just gave her a little more while she was already passed out and she never woke up. Apparently the sister is not the first person he confessed to. He also confessed to a celebrity ex-girlfriend who is an ex-girlfriend because he told her. She thought she was the only one sleeping with him while he was married, but he was also sleeping with his wife and his sister-in-law. At this point, the whole family knows, and has known for almost two years that he did it. That he killed this celebrity. So far though, the family is willing to sweep it under the rug for the sake of the kids. They had already come to terms with the death and even though he was the one who added the extra to kill her, they have convinced themselves she would have ended up dead anyway. There is so much drug death in that family.
Thomas Cohen / Peaches Geldof
Sister: Tigerlily or Pixie Geldof
Celebrity ex: Daisy Lowe

A link to this thread has been circulated on here, much of which seems far fetched (do I need a tin hat) https://alternaticity.boards.net/th...o discuss but at least here is a place for it.

 

[Vanillaco]

I think her and Paula both dealt with being drug addicts and mothers in the same way. By really going hard on the ' earth mother' business. I dont think it was lying or fake but I think it was a desperate attempt to be a good mother in a fake it til you make it way or as a way of getting away from the lure of drugs by being super wholesome, and telling everyone else how super wholesome they were. Unfortunately it wasnt enough for either of them.

 

[Gflo93]

On a less serious note from me (and slightly off topic) Kat Slater used to live in the house behind my friend’s parents house and apparently used to have loud sex in the garden.

 

[OutrageouslyScarlet]

I’m quite shocked at people’s lack of understanding to do with addiction.

 

[lalalanded]

If you knew her when she was 16 which was only 4/5 years after her Mum died and she didn’t pass till 9 years later I don’t think your really in a position to judge her mothering skills. People can do a lot of growing up when they have children of their own.

I didn't know her, I've already stated that before anyone came for me. She took a heroin overdose when she was alone with her baby so yes I can judge her mothering skills.

 

[MunHun]

I should have added, after a night out at a bus stop

Ok that changes my ‘judgement’. I was imagining a middle of the day bus stop scenario that began with ‘Been waiting long?’ and escalated to a night of passion in Bob Geldofs gaff

 

[AdoraDelano]

Could the people discussing drug addictions maybe start a separate topic?

 

[FKAcigs]

I reckon their sex life was crazy wild since he was certainly no slouch in that department himself. Paula said the first time they were together (like together together) he did at least six things in the first thirty minutes she was sure were illegal, including something involving an oyster...

This has been living rent free in my mind since I read it. 🦪

All I can think of is putting the oyster up his/her bum? I'm not very imaginative.

 

[SpiceWeasel]

This thread has really stuck with me since finding it earlier on in the week. Obviously just how sad and tragic Peaches’ death was but it’s just made me think about that era in the 2000s when Peaches was always in the paper for her partying with the rest of that ‘scene’. At that time I thought Pete Doherty was the coolest person alive and my room was plastered with posters and pages ripped out of NME of him. I’ve just got the radio on and randomly it’s a load of indie songs from 2006/7 and it’s just really transported me back there. I was only 14/15 at the time but with Peaches etc it really was a case of ‘I wish that was me’ and if you had asked me at the time what I wanted to be when I grew up my answer would have been thin! I lived in a pair of denim shorts and a Fred Perry polo a la Amy Winehouse. As I mentioned up thread I had an eating disorder and thought I was fat when I was a size 8/10. My mum found those shorts last year and I looked at them and cried, they are so tiny, a size 10 then was more like a 6/8 now. Crazy what we aspire to when we’re kids. At least the magazines aren’t as brutal anymore highlighting women’s cellulite and fixating on weight. But then again, back then there wasn’t Instagram etc, it’s probably even worse now.

ETA eating disorders were almost seen as glamorous at the time! Anyone remember Nicole Richie’s skeletal frame in the mags and her having a party where girls couldn’t attend if they weighed over 100lb! Awful.

 

[DoubleDenim]

Not every person using heroin is a disheveled homeless person on the streets; addiction wrecks havoc through every walk of life and fundamentally it’s a coping mechanism commonly to escape awful memories of childhood trauma.

Agree, my dad was a heroin addict. He ended up getting off it after a long time and then on the drink which is what killed him. Life is too painful for some and an addiction is escapism and/or gives you a reason to get out of bed.

 

[lalalanded]

Angie has said Duncan never wanted to know because she couldn't provide the lifestyle and the money that David could do. That was the issue. If that's correct it says more about Duncan than her.
Its a miracle that Peaches son was O.K. after being left for hours by himself. He could have burned the house down or had a bad accident etc.

Angie was very young when she had Duncan and she's said in the past David really wanted a child after his father passed away so she had one for him. I'm not sure she ever wanted children to be honest. When they split, Duncan was mostly looked after by a nanny and then sent to boarding school. DB was off his face on drugs for years so it's not like he was a hands on father but he paid someone to look after Duncan. He was never vilified the way Angie was. I'm not defending Angie as a parent at all but the double standards when it comes to parenting is outrageous. An absent father doesn't even get acknowledged, an absent mother is treated worse than a murderer in the press.

 

[MunHun]

I think it was almost fortunate he was that age. Not so young that 17 hrs without food/fluid would be life threatening, but young enough that he either wasn’t able to walk well/wasn’t dexterous/was stuck in his cot/would have slept a bit due to dehydration, crying and hunger.


However I agree with everyone saying that she never should have been left in sole charge of either child. Really irresponsible and stupid.

I’d imagine she would have settled him into bed for the night, bathed, fed and fresh. Hopefully he was a good sleeper and slept through the night and then although he would have gotten very upset a while after waking when nobody was responding to him I feel like maybe he must have been asleep when Thomas got to the house as surely he would have went to the room from which the baby’s screaming could be heard but instead he went to the spare room found Peaches dead and then went on to find the baby in whatever room he was. I really hope that the little boy slept for the vast majority of the time he was alone.

 

[Itsaniceday]

I remember the pictures from the pram in the pothole and her on the phone. It was so terrible what happened to her. I did the whole Google and social media hunt a few months ago on her. I remember being really jealous of how skinny she was and I wondered how she got to be so thin. Shame.
I have a son at a similar age to hers when she died and I cannot begin to imagine the screaming and crying that little lad did when she lay there dead. He must have been so scared and upset that his mum wasn’t coming in to console him.

 

[MunHun]

Soooo bit of a long post here and I did not know her at all so this is just all observational but about fifteen years ago I was really into a certain London scene (strictly for the music but the partying was sometimes off the scale) and there was a notorious online forum which I joined to find out what would be going down on any given night. Peaches was a member and posted under her own name so everyone there knew who she was. This forum was notoriously unmoderated and absolutely brutal. If someone said something daft they would take no prisoners. So you can imagine how well a teenage Peaches went down. Looking back she was just a kid trying to hang with the cool crowd but she was pretty daft and annoying. Like I said, the forum could be brutal but there were also a lot of incredibly witty and hilarious people and I would often spend time just howling at their antics. The humour was dark though. They would do things like start a pile on and mercilessly go after people. If Peaches did a magazine article and the comments were left open it was open season. Tbh, her writing was piss poor so I never really felt bad for her.

The scene was pretty hard living but I was on the older end of the spectrum, had a full time job etc so while I probably overdid it at times I was still pretty level headed just massively sleep deprived! But there were really, really young kids on that scene and I was shocked that the recreational drug of choice was smack. When I was their age it was party drugs and even they messed people up. But smack as a party drug? Big problem. Sadly, most of the young ones that started messing with it ended up in huge trouble. Peaches was obviously one of them. I saw it coming when she was about 16 and DJing in a venue in Whitechapel that was notorious for smack being done in the toilets etc. It was really messy. Both her and Pixie were rich girls slumming it and could be rude and entitled. They expected to get in anywhere for free. I didn't like either of them.

No one has mentioned here the amount of work she had done either. She was quite chubby with messed up teeth back in the day so I was surprised when she was reinvented as an earth mother as she was very slim with pearly whites and big lips. She never used to look like that. She was chubby when she was using so I personally don't think it was the drugs. I think she had a hell of a lot of work done including a lap band or weight loss surgery. She honestly looked like a completely different person at the end of her life. Without wanting to sound too mean, I think the husband and babies was just another phase she went through. I don't think it was possible for her to be a good mother and someone else was probably looking after them most of the time.

If you knew her when she was 16 which was only 4/5 years after her Mum died and she didn’t pass till 9 years later I don’t think your really in a position to judge her mothering skills. People can do a lot of growing up when they have children of their own.