Peaches Geldof, the daughter of musician Bob Geldof and the late writer and television presenter Paula Yates, was found dead overnight at her home in the UK. She was just 25.
While her family was a constant fixation in the tabloids, Peaches was able to cultivate a media career of her own.
The former model and television presenter began her career at 15 when she started writing a column for the now-defunct ELLE Girl magazine. She went on to write regular columns for a number of publications, including the Guardian UK and a socio-political column for the Daily Telegraph. In 2005 she presented her own documentary, Peaches Geldof: Teenage Mind. In 2008 she starred in a reality TV show, Peaches: Disappear Here, which followed her journey launching a new youth-oriented magazine.
Married to Thomas Cohen, lead singer of the rock band S.C.U.M since 2012, she was also the mother of two young boys.
She was well known for being outspoken and regularly attracting headlines, but had in recent years also made numerous talk show appearances, promoting her support for attachment parenting and was due to take up a regular spot as a columnist with UK Mother & Baby magazine.
Geldof publicly acknowledged that it took years to come to terms with the death of mother Paula Yates, who died of an accidental heroin overdose when Peaches was just 11. She told Elle magazine in 2012 that she had blocked it out when it happened, but that becoming a mother herself helped her come to terms with it. She also spoke candidly about her transformation from “party girl” to becoming a mother of two young boys, referring to it as her “mama metamorphosis”.
“Becoming a mother was like becoming me, finally,” she said. “After years of struggling to know myself, feeling lost at sea, rudderless and troubled, having babies through which to correct the multiple mistakes of my own traumatic childhood was beyond healing.
“I felt finally anchored in place, with lives that literally depend on me, and I am not about to let them down, not for anyone or anything.”
She also hit back at criticism about growing up spoilt, saying she never lived off the fame of her parents.
“People are always like ‘it must be easy raising kids when you live off your dad”.
“I don’t live off him. I never have. When I was a kid, I never had pocket money. He was like, ‘you have to earn your own money’.”
Confirming her death, her father released an emotional statement, reading: “Peaches has died. We are beyond pain.
“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. Tom and her sons Astala and Phaedra will always belong in our family, fractured so often, but never broken.”