My anguished last phone call with ‘terrified and vulnerable’ Caroline Flack, by the lawyer who says he knows what sowed the seeds of her suicide – and that her life COULD have been saved

Just three weeks before Caroline Flack committed suicide, she desperately called a lawyer, who she hoped could put an end to the impending trial against her for assault after she hit her boyfriend with a lamp in the anger of a jealous lover.

Distraught, but still determined to find a solution, she had called Lancashire-based lawyer Nick Green.

Caroline was introduced to Green by her friend and fellow TV presenter Melanie Sykes, who made her name as the face of Boddington’s Bitter adverts in the 1990s.

In strangely similar circumstances, Mel Sykes was also arrested for allegedly assaulting her much younger husband Jack Cockings in 2013.

Mel, I can reveal, was ‘deeply concerned’ about the Love Island presenter. Rightly so, as it turned out.

Following Green’s legal representation, all charges against Ms Sykes were subsequently dropped and the following year the common assault caution she had received was expunged from her criminal record.

Mel was no doubt hoping her lawyer could do the same for Caroline. And as he tells the Mail exclusively, he certainly hoped he could.

The lawyer, based in Lytham St Annes, asked some deeply disturbing questions about how the 40-year-old star was treated – by police, lawyers and the Crown Prosecution Service – before her suicide on February 15, 2020.

Recalling their conversation three weeks earlier, on January 24, he says he was immediately struck by how terrified and vulnerable she sounded.

‘I accepted and immediately recognized the fear and pain in her voice. She was almost in tears,” he told me. ‘I broke the ice by interrupting her. “Caroline, I have to warn you: if you start crying, I’ll put the phone down.”

Despite her obvious sadness, Green reveals that there was still a spark of the old Caroline, adding: ‘Then I heard the cackle that Caroline was showing on our television screens. Her strength of character returned.”

What seemed to disturb Caroline most was bodycam footage taken by police on the night she was accused of attacking Lewis Burton, then 27, as he slept. When officers arrived at her north London flat on December 12, 2019, they found the pair covered in blood and Caroline with cuts to her wrist.

After being treated in hospital, she was given a warning before being charged with assault. She was due to stand trial in March 2020 – a CPS decision that left her horrified. Caroline told friends that she would “rather die” than have that night’s recordings played in a public arena, and she wanted Green to help her.

Green’s main concern, he told the Mail, was the strict bail condition imposed on Caroline to prevent her contacting Burton – a former tennis player and model who she believed was cheating on her.

As Green notes, this was an unusually strict condition and may have contributed to Caroline’s already fragile mental health deteriorating even further.

Normally, anyone accused of a crime is entitled to unconditional bail, especially if he or she is of good character and the crime is minor – both of which applied to Caroline Flack.

All the blood police found at the scene was hers. Burton reportedly suffered a superficial cut on his head, which required no treatment. Green also says there was no ‘vulnerable victim’ – another common requirement for bail conditions like hers.

Burton himself made it clear from the start that he did not want Caroline to be charged, and refused to make a statement in the hope that this would lead to the charges being dropped. There were more points, says Groen, that should have been taken into account.

“There were no children involved,” he said. “And Caroline had her own home to return to, independent of her boyfriend.”

He also emphasized that she was a mature woman of good character, with no history of domestic violence.

So no strict conditions were necessary and, he said, Caroline was treated as a ‘target criminal’.

“I believe it was the invocation of this ‘no contact’ condition that sowed the seeds for her suicide,” he says. ‘It left her isolated and emotional, and continually affected her fragile mental state.’

Green also reveals that Caroline said she was ‘scared’ of a female CPS prosecutor.

He said: ‘When I asked if she had applied to a Crown Court judge to lift the restraining order condition, she replied: ‘I was told not to.’ I spat out, “Why not, Caroline?” All I heard so far was the strength of CPS and Caroline’s vulnerability.’

Green says Caroline told him she had been advised not to challenge the order because the hearing would be covered by the press – something she “couldn’t face”.

‘She told me she feared this would lead to more media attention and that the prosecutor had threatened to play the bodycam footage. All my fears were confirmed. I got everything back when I told her that an appeal had been made [to remove the ‘no-contact condition’] would be heard in the judge’s chambers and she did not have to be present, it was ‘this is not what my lawyers told me’. The more I heard, the more I hated it.

‘It was no wonder her mental state had taken a nosedive. You never win anything with the back foot – unless you’re a tennis player.’ This last joke – a reference to Burton’s earlier career – made Caroline laugh, he says.

But he would never hear that again. Three weeks later Caroline was found dead in her flat in Stoke Newington. She had just learned that her trial for the incident was indeed going ahead.

Earlier this year, Caroline’s mother, Christine, revealed that the Independent Office for Police Conduct has urged the Metropolitan Police to reopen its investigation into her daughter’s case.

The watchdog has recommended interviewing an officer who attended Caroline’s arrest and is believed to have been involved in the attempt to override the CPS’ decision to give her a warning – something that left her ‘in pieces’, according to friends Louise Teasdale and Mollie Grosberg, who were by her side after her first suicide attempt the day before her death.

Caroline’s twin sister Jody was due to take over the next day, but the pair left before she arrived. Several accounts say they briefly went to the shops, others say they were told to leave by Caroline.

Now questions about this, and others, are being asked in a documentary on Disney+, led by Christine.

Green believes the star could have been saved.

“Caroline was at her wits’ end because of the failures and pressure on her,” he tells me. Today he hopes to help Christine in her search for the truth about her daughter’s tragic death.