In a lengthy video today shared on Instagram and Twitter, Danny Cipriani spoke out about the death of his former girlfriend Caroline Flack. The former rugby player said the pair had always been in contact, following her call to him the day before she died last weekend, aged 40.
The tearful 32-year-old told his 210,000 Instagram followers: “I have to tell this story… oh my god… I have rehearsed this so much in my mind.
“So someone that I loved as a person very dearly and someone I was very close to has decided to take her own life as everyone knows.”
Danny continued: “We’ve always been in contact since we were together, since we weren’t, and it’s always been a loving friendship.
“I was so vulnerable with her in my moments, when we first met and I told her everything about me because I felt safe with her.”
In the raw 18-minute upload he addressed missing Caroline’s call and shared his “most shameful” moment in bid to help others suffering like her.
He said: “The ritual is I sit at home crying and the ritual is I have a lot of guilt, and the ritual at the moment is I have a lot of anger.
“But if I stay on to that it will break me, so I have to see the meaning she decided to call me in her last moments, when she was with her two best friends.”(sic)
Danny said the pair had been “vulnerable” together and thanked her for finding a “safe space” with him.
He went on: “I felt safe with her but it needs to change, we need to be able to be vulnerable – it doesn’t matter what scale it is.
“It doesn’t matter if you tripped over and you feel a bit of shame, and people are looking at you.”
Recalling her text on Friday night, Danny recalled how Caroline “said she had to plead guilty” after being charged with the assault of her boyfriend Lewis Burton.
Danny told fans: “I had a game of rugby, which again is another story – a distraction, everything is a distraction until we actually understand that love and healing and coming together is what we need to do.”
He detailed how he attempted to purchase a gun from a man at a nightclub in London when he was suffering with severe depression at 22.
He added: “I see clearly now and I hate the fact that it’s taken someone so kind and so beautiful, and had just as many faults as me and you, but never malicious…
“She was kind, she was loving… the voice note she sent me when she was broken and she was moved on, she spent the last 20 seconds asking how I am and how’s rugby.”(sic)
Danny claimed it was “embarrassment and shame that killed” Caroline, who knew “everything” about him.