Peaches Geldof, journalist, TV personality and one-time model, who had two young children, has been found dead at her home at the age of 25. Police officers said they were treating her passing as “sudden” and “unexplained” almost 15 years after the abrupt and public death of her own mother.
The rock star scion became one of the loudest voices of her generation; prolific on social media and in the British press. The final message she posted on Twitter and Instagram was a photograph with her mother, who died suddenly when she was just 11, alongside the message: “Me and my mum.”
Peaches, who herself had two children under the age of two, grew up in the public eye, with a column in Elle magazine by the time she was 16. Her father, Bob Geldof, the musician who masterminded the Live Aid concerts in the 1980s, was left to raise her when his estranged wife Paula Yates, a television presenter and writer, died of a heroin overdose. A coroner ruled that her death was an accident, not suicide, despite her obvious despair at the sudden death of her lover Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of INXS.
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Geldof announced the death of his daughter in a written statement signed by him and his other children. “Peaches has died. We are beyond pain,” he wrote. “She was the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest and the most bonkers of all of us.
“Writing ‘was’ destroys me afresh. What a beautiful child. How is this possible that we will not see her again? How is that bearable? We loved her and will cherish her forever. How sad that sentence is.”
Police in Kent, South East England, where she lived, told The Daily Beast they had visited the address after receiving a call expressing concern for the welfare of a 25-year old woman at 1:35p.m. She was subsequently pronounced dead at the scene by the Ambulance service. “The death is being treated as a non-suspicious, but unexplained, sudden death,” a spokesman said.
Peaches had two young sons, Astala, 20 months, and Phaedra, 10 months, with her second husband, Thomas Cohen, singer of the London band S.C.U.M. “My beloved wife Peaches was adored by myself and her two sons,” he said. “I shall bring them up with their mother in their hearts everyday. We shall love her forever.”
The young mother built up a reputation as something of a nightlife fixture as a teenager, associating with a glossy crowd of stylists and the staff of fashion magazines, who were always tempting her onto their pages. She was also often seen in the front row at fashion week and on the London party circuit. The last time she was seen in public was during London Fashion Week on April 3. She attended the Temperley shows, and was an enthusiastic cheerleader for British fashion as a whole.
Given her lineage, however, it was inevitable that she would end up gravitating towards the music scene, and in recent years her circle of friends included the British singer Eliza Doolittle, Lily Allen and Pixie Lott.
Peaches moved to Brooklyn in 2008 after marrying American musician Max Drummey from the band Chester French in a surprise ceremony following a whirlwind romance. She had his name tattooed on her inner wrist, but they separated a year later and divorced in 2011. In recent months, Peaches had taken to applying make-up over her tattoos when she was going out to project a more mature look. After a short relationship with film director Eli Roth, Geldof married Cohen.
In 2010 it was reported that she taken heroin during a one-night stand with an American who boasted about the exploits and posted nude pictures of them on Reddit. Geldof admitted that it was her in the images, but denied using the drug.
In recent years she had been notably less visible at UK events after she moved out of London and spent more time at home with her husband and two children in Kent.
Like many new parents, her photo streams were dominated by pictures of her children and family life, although on the rare nights out it was still her music-industry mates who would be found by her side.
For all her notoriety, Peaches had always struggled to find her niche, bouncing between journalism, modeling and reality TV since her teens. Her next appointment with the public was going to be a charity show on the BBC called Top Dog, in which several celebrities and their pet dogs went head to head in a series of exercises that test their physical agility.
The 15-part show was due to begin on March 3, with Peaches paring up with her Golden Retriever, Parper.
She was last in the headlines in Britain when she was threatened with a criminal investigation for publicly naming the mothers of the children abused by British rock singer Ian Watkins in November last year.
She sent out tweets reading, “So apparently the names of the women who offered their children up to be raped by Ian Watkins have already been released by the Welsh court and on several different websites. The names are [X] and [X], sick horrible women. It sickens me to see just how far the cult of celebrity and super fandom has come when grown women are passing their own kids around. I hate the world sometimes.”
Peaches was apparently unaware that the mother’s identities were being legally protected to prevent their children from being identified. The police didn’t take the matter any further, not least because in one important respect Peaches was —the authorities had named the mothers on a court service’s listing site.
