‘If that person hadn’t changed their mind, then Caroline Flack might still be with us today’: The inside story of the three hours and a fateful decision that her friends blame for her tragic suicide is revealed by KATIE HIND

At 9am on a freezing December morning in 2019, Caroline Flack made a tearful phone call to a friend at a north London police station.

The television presenter had just been told she would be charged with common assault after punching her boyfriend Lewis Burton in her flat.

She was desperate: just three hours earlier she had been told she would be released with a warning.

This new decision by police left the much-loved presenter of ITV’s controversial reality series Love Island ‘in pieces’, according to her friends.

Two months later, Flack, 40, who had slit her own wrists in the aftermath of her violent row with Burton, took her own life at her home in Stoke Newington, north-east London.

“She couldn’t understand why one minute they had said everything would be fine and the next minute her life was in tatters,” said a friend.

“If that decision hadn’t changed, Caroline might still be with us today. It haunts everyone who loved Caroline. No one can understand it.’

Now there is a renewed sense of poignancy after Flack’s mother Christine revealed that the Independent Office of Police Conduct has urged the Met to reopen the investigation into her beloved late daughter’s case.

The watchdog has recommended that the Armed Forces Professional Standards Directorate interview an officer who was present at the time of Flack’s arrest.

He is alleged to have been involved in the attempt to overturn the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision to give her a warning over her attack on Burton, a former tennis player and model with whom she was in love.

After the incident, Burton had refused to make a statement to police, hoping this would lead to police dropping charges.

Christine said yesterday: ‘Something very unusual has happened to Carrie [Caroline] that night at the police station, but no one kept a proper file explaining why.

“I have now filed a complaint to force the officer to make the statement we believe he should have made four years ago. As a family we have important, unanswered questions.’

She also revealed that she had unsuccessfully requested a meeting with Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

“He has refused to talk to me,” she said. “Now it’s time for America’s law enforcement to give us full disclosure.”

The missing account of events by the unnamed officer is seen as an ‘excellent line of inquiry’. And today the Mail can reveal that what happened in those crucial three hours is one of the problems Christine is now determined to find answers to.

A friend said: ‘There was disagreement between the CPS and the Met about how the case should proceed. Between 6am and 9am something changed and although it didn’t seem like a big problem to the police at the time, it has now become so.

‘We all want to know what happened during that time, why it was decided that she will be charged and who is behind it. We want to know everything. Caroline was never the same after that: we owe it to her to find out the truth.’

Flack’s twin sister Jody fled her home in Kensal Rise, north-west London, to collect her after learning of the trauma she suffered at the police station.

Her wounds from cutting her wrists were so bad that she spent ten hours in the hospital getting them treated. Jody and other members of her family are also said to be ‘shocked, angry and upset’ that the star’s fragile mental state was not adequately taken into account by the legal system.

As part of her bail conditions, Flack was not allowed to see Burton. She was left heartbroken by the decision and I can reveal for the first time that she was ‘too sad’ to return to the £1 million flat where she lived with Burton – and where the incident took place.

Instead she holed up in the £500-a-night members’ club, The Ned. Given its location in the old Midland Bank headquarters in the City of London – far away from the usual celebrity haunts – Flack thought it would offer her unusual privacy.

Once settled in, she hardly left her suite, spending her time watching “crap” television and ordering food from room service.

“It was Caroline’s place of comfort, she just came up with the idea of ​​going there,” says a former colleague of Flack. ‘She thought the city was full of people who didn’t really care about her, so it was the perfect place.

‘No one ever discovered she was there, but it was her home for several weeks. She couldn’t bear to go back to the flat where she hit Lewis. It was all too sad for her.’

But while The Ned offered her some solace, her career was in freefall. Despite not being convicted of any crime, she was almost immediately sacked from her £1.2million-a-year job on Love Island and replaced by presenter Laura Whitmore.

While those close to Flack say she knew there was no guarantee she would get her job back if found not guilty, ITV bosses say she was offered support.

Her six-figure contract with Polaroid sunglasses was also put on hold.

In addition to all this bad news, she also feared for her upcoming trial. Flack later moved to a new flat, where she hanged herself on February 15, 2020.

Flack’s friends point out that she always said she would “rather die” than see police bodycam footage of herself the night she hit Burton, let alone see it in open court during the trial , which was scheduled for March 4. 2020.

The police recording shows her covered in blood and crying uncontrollably, in a scene that looked “like a horror movie.”

Her fear that these grisly images of her, deeply distressed, barely clothed and with self-inflicted cuts, would be placed in the public domain would have contributed to this.

For that reason, Flack – ‘Carrie’ to her grieving parents and four siblings – was initially adamant that she wanted to plead guilty to Burton’s assault. “She thought it would mean she could get on with her life,” said a friend.

‘Yes, she was distraught about what she did, but in her eyes it was an accident. She didn’t care about losing her job on Love Island, she just wanted the whole episode to go away.

“Anyway, she felt like she’d done five years of Love Island and maybe it was time for it to end.”

It was a move approved by one of her most trusted and longtime show business friends, Russell Brand, who believed it would have been the best path forward for her.

However, after consultation with her legal team, Flack pleaded not guilty at the initial hearing at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court on Christmas Eve 2019. A trial date of March 4 was then set.

“You keep thinking that if she had pleaded guilty, she could have been alive today,” the friend said. ‘She was so ashamed at the thought of those images appearing, it was too much to bear.

“She always said she would rather die than have it come out publicly in court, but we didn’t know she really meant it.”

But, as another friend is quick to point out, if the Met had not overruled their colleagues at the CPS, Flack would almost certainly be here today to tell the story.