Caroline Flack: Search For The Truth review — A repellant true crime framing of a tragedy

The 2021 documentary on the death of Caroline Flack was a timely reckoning on the destructive nature of fame on vulnerable women. This two-part follow-up, Caroline Flack: Search For The Truth on Disney+, is very much not that. It’s a gruesome two-part post-mortem where a clearly grieving mother metastasises her loss as a lurid true crime who-dunnit. Christine Flack is a woman in limbo, unable to process the death of her daughter Caroline, who died by suicide (although her mother uses terminology that most people have moved away from) aged 40 in February 2020 while she awaited a trial for an alleged assault against her then-boyfriend Lewis Burton. She has spent the past half-decade demanding answers, obtaining police documents and trying in vain to arrange meetings with leaders from the institutions she believes are to blame for Caroline’s death. Christine firmly believes that, had the courts dropped the case and the Sun not run the photos of the alleged crime scene, her daughter would still be alive. She clearly carries huge guilt along with her grief, not least because — as recounted in the final part of the second episode — she accepted a sop from Rebecca Brooks to present an award on behalf of the Sun at a star-studded ceremony. Despite receiving an apology from the Met over lax record-keeping in 2023, Christine is determined to pursue the fact the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had recommended Caroline receive only a caution only to have a detective from the Met appeal, leading to the star facing a charge of assault by beating. I would never side with the Met on, well, anything. It does seem remarkable that a rare decision was made to push forward with prosecution, probably one driven by fear of what the media would make if they dropped it. Yet the wheels were already in motion from the moment Burton called the cops on his girlfriend. The documentary acknowledges Caroline’s neighbours had already alerted the press to her arrest, and journalists were contacting the station she was ultimately held in. Burton took a photo of the crime scene and allegedly sent it on to a friend who sold it to the Sun who printed it in all its gory detail. Emergency responders described the scene as one from a horror movie, but the blood was all Caroline’s. Somewhere between the assault on Burton and the police’s arrival, she had self-harmed so severely she had cut her arms down to the muscle. The prosecutor’s words, repeated in the press, implied it was the result of Burton’s head wound from a large object, a myth that still persists on corners of the internet to this day. Caroline was the one who required hospitalisation. Both of them had been drinking. Confusion from Burton and the police meant no one was immediately clear what the weapon was — initially they all assumed it was a bedside lamp or a desk fan. Caroline had only hit Burton as he slept with a phone clutched in her hand, after seeing texts flash up she felt were suspicious. But she also admitted guilt repeatedly during the arrest. While highly unusual, the decision to push back on the CPS decision was clearly done from an abundance of caution that if they screwed up, the British press would scrutinise them too. Damned if they did or they didn’t. Domestic violence calls, as any detective would attest, are enormously tricky. More often than not, by the morning the alleged victim will often recant — just as Burton did. Caroline’s greatest fear, according to her family and friends, was that going to trial would involve body camera footage taken that night, where she was half-dressed, covered in her own blood, and clearly in immense psychological distress. But in trying to clear Caroline’s name and point fingers, I fear Christine will activate the internet sleuths and their insatiable appetite for true crime. The clicking calendar scroll counting down to Caroline’s suicide is particularly tasteless. As is the confrontation of Caroline’s agent, Louisa Booth, who is clearly deeply traumatised when asked to divulge events such as Caroline’s suicide attempt on the night before her first court appearance in December 2019. Nobody involved on the night of the police callout, including Burton, agreed to take part. So instead the documentary follows Christine as she meets with tangentially related people — a former police officer, friendly showbiz journalist Paul Martin — who can only speculate as to what might have happened in the station and in news rooms. But there is much else to speculate upon. Why was Caroline not immediately bundled off to in-patient treatment or rehab, with a boilerplate public statement about her mental health made to to the press? She made her first suicide attempt as a teenager, but rejected a doctor’s suggestion of bipolar disorder and was never formally diagnoses. She self-harmed severely on the night of the police call. Booth reveals Caroline drank the minibar dry at the Ned, where she initially retreated, and overdosed on prescription pills hours before she had to be in court that first time. Her friends called a doctor, who advised them to make her sick. She also appears to have made another attempt while staying at a gated apartment, and paramedics were called. But she refused to go to hospital and was furious at her friends for trying to help. Brushing off the domestic violence narrative as ridiculous also makes things messy. Nobody knows what was happening in that six month relationship that even her friends describe as volatile. Caroline’s detractors regularly point to the 12-year age gap between her and Burton, who was 27 to her 39 when they met, and that she was the bigger celebrity. That she had also dated Harry Styles when he was 17 and she was 39. And even without the false narrative about the lamp, the extreme self harm episode during the confrontation was frightening and potentially coercive behaviour. Calling the police on one’s partner is also an extreme act, but again, we never hear Burton’s side. Martin implies that, as the less famous one, the former tennis player was a poor choice for Caroline — not just because it would make for less juicy headlines, but because he didn’t understand the stakes such a high profile pairing would mean. Why is Martin weighing in? He’s said on Instagram that 39 other journalists approached wouldn’t appear in this documentary. He was friendly with the TV presenter at some point, although had been laid off by the Irish Mail on Sunday years before the events here took place. Cristine speaks scathingly of Andrew Brady, Caroline’s ex fiancé, who thrust himself into the narrative after her arrest. Christine alleges he would regularly threaten Caroline with going to the press with stories about her while they were in a relationship. Which does not sound healthy at all. Not mentioned in the documentary is that after Caroline’s death, Brady defended the prosecution but also blamed the media. In 2022 he was jailed for harassing journalist Dan Wootton, former executive editor of the Sun newspaper, over false claims regarding her death. Presented all together, it paints a picture of extreme toxicity and dysfunction in Caroline’s life, amplified by alcohol and the potential for an undiagnosed mental illness. Cops and hacks clearly played a part in the whole sorry story, but it’s not the open and shut case the documentary makes it out to be. Prosecutors can’t drop a case because it would ruin someone’s life or career. The tabloids were mercenary, but Caroline had played their fame game up until then, giving them stories that best suited her narrative. Instead, it opens a whole pantry full of canned worms by implying there are dark conspiracies to be unearthed. Christine wants to re-litigate her daughter’s death — I hope someone warned her to be careful what you wish for. Caroline Flack: Search For The Truth is streaming now on Disney