Cipriani: I tried to buy a gun to take my own life
In emotional tribute to Caroline Flack, rugby star ex reveals his own mental health struggle
DANNY Cipriani yesterday revealed he tried to buy a gun to kill himself ten years ago as he paid an emotional tribute to former girlfriend Caroline Flack.
Fighting back tears, the England rugby player said he wanted to tell everyone about his own mental health issues in the hope that her ‘life will not go in vain’.
In an 18-minute Instagram video, he urged people to be kind and said: ‘I’m trying to say it’s ok to be vulnerable – that it doesn’t matter what people say about you.’
Love Island host Ms Flack, 40, was found dead at her home in Stoke Newington, east London, last Saturday. Her death is understood to have come just hours after she learned that prosecutors had ruled she would face trial over an alleged assault on her boyfriend, Lewis Burton, 27.
Cipriani, 32, dated Ms Flack last year. During the emotional video yesterday he said he had suffered from ‘severe depression’ when he was 22 and had spent nine months seeing a psychiatrist.
During that time, he met a ‘bad man’ at a London nightclub. ‘I decided at a point it was time for me to take my own life and I tried to buy a gun from him. I pulled out of it and I tried to buy it and I pulled out of it, and this went on [for] two months and I couldn’t do it because I had some fight in me,’ he said.
Cipriani, who now plays for Gloucester, said he had been speaking to Ms Flack over the past ‘three or four months’ and described her as ‘so kind and so beautiful’.
She texted him last Friday and said that she ‘had to plead guilty’ over the alleged assault, he said. Cipriani had previously told of how he missed a phone call from her on the Friday night in the hours before she killed herself because he was playing for Gloucester against Exeter in the Gallagher Premiership.
Yesterday, he described how even in the voice message she left him ‘when she was broken’ she spent ‘the last 20 seconds asking me how I am and how’s rugby and how’s this’. Cipriani said: ‘I have to see the meaning in why she decided to call me in her last moments… How much love and trust did she have for me because we had been vulnerable and shared together?
‘She felt it was a safe space so I thank her for that because I felt safe with her.’
He went on: ‘She made me feel ok. And ultimately it was embarrassment and shame that killed her.’
Fly-half Cipriani has won 16 caps for England, with the most recent in 2018, during a sporting career that has been blighted with off-field controversies. He was convicted of drink-driving after crashing his €72,000 Mercedes into a taxi in London in 2016.
Three years earlier he spent weeks being nursed back to health by then girlfriend Kelly Brook after being hit by a bus on a pub crawl.
The Samaritans have a free helpline for those needing support on 116123. Further information is available at www.samaritans.org/ireland
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