Peaches Geldof's final interview: The socialite on fame, heroin and people's expectations that she would die like her mother Paula Yates
The model and television presenter said that her life was "preordained"
![Peaches Geldof said that the worst thing about growing up famous was people’s preconceptions](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2014/06/20/00/peaches-geldof.jpg)
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Kelly Rissman
US News Reporter
Peaches Geldof told in her last interview of her frustration that people expected her to die like her mother Paula Yates.
The 25-year-old told the writer William Todd Schultz in an interview that has been published in The Spectator that the worst thing about growing up famous was people’s preconceptions.
She said: “It’s like I’m someone in a book. Your life, they keep telling you, is pre-ordained: 'I’m going to die like my mother, she’s going to end up like her mother.'”
Ms Geldof was found unconscious in the home she shared with her musician husband Thomas Cohen, in Wrotham, Kent, on 7 April.
An initial post-mortem last month revealed heroin was 'likely' to have been involved in her death, suggesting that there were in fact similarities with the death of her mother, who was found dead from an accidental heroin overdose at her home in 2000, aged 41.
In her final interview, Ms Geldof had also spoken about heroin, saying: “Heroin is such a bleak drug.
“It always makes me so sad to hear about people like [the actor Philip Seymour] Hoffman who were real masters and also family men who were just wasted by the constant, gnawing obsession with it. All heroin users seem to have the same core internal pain though. It’s a fascinating concept — drug of choice.”
Describing the pressures of growing up in a famous family, the daughter of Sir Bob Geldof, the musician and Live Aid organiser, said: “Every mistake I made was not only watched by my parents but the whole of the public. It was scary.
“From day one it was super intense. I was hyperaware of it. But as a kid, of course, I wasn’t mentally capable of understanding it. And the paparazzi freaked me out.”
Celebrities, she said, are “human beings who happen to be objects of extreme attention. But because you are unreachable, people throw rocks at you, like stoning you.”
People, she added, “love a downfall. Humans at their core are so rotten. They’re a hateful breed. It’s exciting to hate celebrities.”
Ms Geldof admitted that it was impossible to ignore what people were saying about her.
She said: “Anyone who says they don’t read their own press is categorically lying. You need to keep on top of it for your work. You cannot be in the public eye and not have it affect you.”
Perhaps ironically, Ms Geldof also said that becoming a mother to her two young sons had changed the public’s perception of her, and moved people away from predicting that she would share the same fate as her mother.
She said: “Suddenly I was this earth mother. It was an overnight transformation. Out of nowhere, it was ‘Dang. We can’t hate you anymore. Here she is in her golden hair, etc.’ Now, for the first time ever, there was gushing adulation.”
Just weeks before her death, Ms Geldof was named as a new columnist for Mother and Baby magazine.
In her only column for the magazine, published in May, she revealed she was “happier than ever” as a mother of two.
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