At 9am on a freezing December morning in 2019, Caroline Flack made a tearful phone call to a friend from a North London police station.
The television presenter had just been told she was to be charged with common assault after hitting her boyfriend Lewis Burton at her flat.
She was distraught: just three hours earlier, she had been told she would be let off with a caution.
This new decision by the police left the much-loved host of ITV’s controversial reality series, Love Island, ‘in pieces’, according to her friends.
Two months later, Flack, 40, who had cut her own wrists in the aftermath of her violent row with Burton, took her life at her home in Stoke Newington, North-East London.
In 2019, Caroline Flack was charged with common assault after hitting her boyfriend Lewis Burton at her flat
‘She couldn’t compute why they had one minute said everything was going to be okay and then the next her life was in tatters,’ says a pal.
‘If that decision hadn’t changed, then Caroline might still be with us today. It utterly haunts everyone who loved Caroline. Nobody can understand it.’
Now there is a renewed sense of poignancy after Flack’s mother Christine revealed that the Independent Office of Police Conduct has urged the Met to reopen its investigation into the case of her beloved late daughter.
The watchdog has recommended that the force’s Directorate of Professional Standards interviews an officer who was present at the time of Flack’s arrest.
He was said to have been involved in the move to overrule the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision to issue her with a caution for her attack on Burton — a former tennis player and model with whom she was besotted.
Following the incident, Burton had refused to make a statement to the police, in the hope this would lead to the police dropping the charges.
Burton posted a picture of the couple on Instagram after Flack’s death in 2020 with the caption: ‘My heart is broken we had something so special’
Christine said yesterday: ‘Something very unusual happened to Carrie [Caroline] at the police station that night, but no one kept a proper record explaining why.
‘I’ve now made a complaint to compel the officer to give the statement we think he should have given four years ago. As a family, we have been left with important, unanswered questions.’
She also revealed she had requested a meeting with Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police — without success.
‘He has refused to speak to me,’ she said. ‘Now it’s time the Met gave us full disclosure.’
The unnamed officer’s missing account of events is understood to be viewed as an ‘outstanding line of inquiry’. And, today, the Mail can reveal that what happened in those crucial three hours is one of the issues to which Christine is now determined to find answers.
Caroline Flack presented ITV’s Love Island for the first five series, from 2015 until 2019
One friend said: ‘There was a disagreement between the CPS and the Met over how the case should proceed. Between the hours of 6am and 9am something changed and, while at the time it didn’t seem like a huge deal to the police, now it has become so.
‘We all want to know what went on during that time, why the decision was reached that she would be charged and who was behind it. We want to know everything. Caroline was never the same afterwards: we owe it to her to find out the truth.’
Flack’s twin sister Jody dashed from her home in Kensal Rise, north-west London, to pick her up after learning of the trauma she’d endured at the police station.
Her injuries from cutting her wrists were so bad that she spent ten hours in hospital having them tended to. Jody and other members of her family were also said to be ‘horrified, angry and upset’ at how the star’s frail mental state was not sufficiently taken into account by the justice system.
A court sketch of Flack at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court where she pleaded not guilty to assaulting her boyfriend in December, 2019
As part of her bail conditions, Flack was banned from seeing Burton. She was heartbroken at the decision and I can reveal for the first time that she was ‘too sad’ to return to the £1 million flat where she lived with Burton — and where the incident took place.
Instead she holed up in the £500-a-night members’ club, The Ned. Given its location in the old Midland Bank headquarters in the City of London — far from the usual celebrity haunts — Flack thought it would offer her some unaccustomed privacy.
Once ensconced, she barely left her suite, spending her time watching ‘rubbish’ television and ordering food on room service.
‘It was Caroline’s place of solace, she just came up with the idea of going there,’ a former colleague of Flack’s tells me. ‘She thought the City was full of people who wouldn’t really care about her so it was the perfect place.
‘Nobody ever found out she was there but it was her home for some weeks. She couldn’t face going back to the flat where she hit Lewis. It was all too sad for her.’
But, while The Ned offered her some consolation, her career was in freefall. Despite not having been convicted of any offence, she was almost immediately sacked from her £1.2million-a-year job on Love Island and replaced by presenter Laura Whitmore.
Floral tributes laid by fans and admirers outside Caroline Flack’s former home in North London after her death in 2020
While those close to Flack say she knew there was no guarantee of getting her job back if she was found not guilty, ITV bosses say she was offered support.
Her six-figure contract with Polaroid sunglasses was also ‘put on hold’.
On top of all this bad news, she was dreading her upcoming court date. Flack later moved into a new flat, where she hanged herself on February 15, 2020.
Friends of Flack point out that she always said she would ‘rather die’ than see the police bodycam footage of herself on the night she hit Burton, let alone see it played in open court at the trial, which had been set for March 4, 2020.
The police recording shows her covered in her own blood, weeping uncontrollably, in a scene that was ‘like a horror movie’.
Her fears that these lurid images of her, severely distressed, barely clothed and with self-inflicted cuts, would be put into the public domain are thought to have been contributing factors.
For that reason, Flack — ‘Carrie’ to her grieving parents and four siblings — was initially adamant she wanted to plead guilty to assaulting Burton. ‘She thought it would mean she could move on with her life,’ said a friend.
‘Yes, she was distraught at what she did but, in her eyes, it was an accident. She didn’t care about losing her job on Love Island, she just wanted the whole episode to go away.
‘In any case, she felt she had done five years of Love Island and that perhaps it was time it came to an end.’
It was a move approved by one of her most trusted and long-standing showbusiness friends, Russell Brand, who believed it would have been the best way forward for her.
However, after consultation with her legal team, Flack pleaded not guilty at the first hearing at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court on Christmas Eve 2019. The trial date of March 4 was then set.
‘You can’t stop thinking that if she had pleaded guilty, she could be alive today,’ said the friend. ‘She felt so much shame at the thought of that footage coming out, it was too much to bear.
‘She would say that she’d rather die than it come out publicly in court but we didn’t realise she actually meant it.’
But, as another friend is quick to point out, if the Met had not overruled their colleagues at the CPS, Flack almost certainly would be here today to tell the tale.
