Peaches Geldof is 25 years old and the daughter of famous parents. She is married, and has two children. She also died today.

These are the only facts we know.

Although Peaches may be an inheritor of her parent’s celebrity status, this does not mean that she is the heir of a drug addiction. The death, which has been understandably described as ‘unexplained and sudden’, has been tarred with the brush of gossip-mongering, celebrity-hawking vultures who have decided to determine her fate before even the faintest brush of pathological scrutiny. As her eyelids shut, Peaches’ integrity became the bitter game of public property; a place where judge and jury exist on the back of misquoted facts and semblances of understandings garnered from trashy magazines.

Of course, this is prime narrative fodder for several news outlets. In one fatal swoop, the celebrity meets a premature, tragic end like her own mother. To add a dash of irony to the tale, Peaches’ last tweet features an image of mother and daughter, both blissfully ignorant to the corporeal carvery that would ensue on the back of their mortality. Plotting the endgame in the hope of cyclical journey, sites such as Channel 4 have planted implications for the celebrity’s death far beyond the scheme of suggestion. Opening their copy with ‘Geldof is the daughter of the late Paula Yates, who was found dead at her home in London of a heroin overdose in 2000’, the verdict is already given. As I write, glitzy media types are sitting in plush chairs, speculating the woman’s demise as a drug-laced destruction, just an hour after the death has been announced. Waiting is erroneous and boring. The public want to know the outcome now.

It’s a worry to what ends one will go to make a good story. Celebrity-lovers are desperate for a tidy plot. What’s saddening is how many publications want to give it to them. Peaches’ death is being touted as a moral lesson, a didactic to the boring and dissatisfied who envied her luxurious life. It’s disturbing to note how much those who followed her fame rejoice in her demise. Respect is a mere afterthought, a tidal wave amongst Bob’s grievances for ‘the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest and the most bonkers of all of us’. These thoughts are surrounded in comparative images of Peaches and Paula, his words choked by the reader’s desire for history to repeat itself.

Amongst all of this madness, we can only hope that Peaches’ family find a way to come to terms with this heart-wrenching grief, running past the circus to find respite in their most vivid, compelling memories. Death is the conclusive evidence of the bloodlust of celebritydom, as one woman’s death becomes the mechanics of a deserved, final act of a tragedy.

Jasmine Andersson