My anguished final telephone name with ‘terrified and susceptible’ Caroline Flack, by the lawyer who says he is aware of what sowed the seeds of her suicide – and that her life COULD have been saved

Just three weeks before Caroline Flack took her own life, she made a desperate phone call to a lawyer who she hoped could put a stop to the forthcoming trial she was facing for assault after hitting her boyfriend with a lamp in a jealous lover’s rage.

Distraught yet still determined to find a solution, she’d made a call to Lancashire-based lawyer Nick Green.

Caroline was put in touch with Green by her friend and fellow TV presenter Melanie Sykes, who made her name as the main face of Boddingtons Bitter adverts during the Nineties.

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

Mel, I can reveal, was ‘deeply worried’ about the Love Island presenter. Rightly so, as it transpired.

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

No doubt, Mel hoped her solicitor could do the same for Caroline. And, as he exclusively tells the Mail, he certainly hoped he could too.

The solicitor, based in Lytham St Annes, raised some very 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 took the call, and instantly recognised the fear and pain in her voice. She was close to tears,’ he told me. ‘I broke the ice by interrupting her. ‘Caroline, I must warn you, if you start to cry, I’ll put the phone down.’

Despite her obvious grief, Green reveals there was a spark of the old Caroline still there, adding: ‘I then heard the cackle Caroline displayed on our television screens. Her strength of character was returning.’

What seemed to be troubling Caroline the most was body-cam 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 had found the pair covered in blood and Caroline with cuts to her wrist.

After being treated in hospital, she was served with a caution before being charged with assault. She was due to stand trial in March 2020 – a decision by the CPS which filled her with horror. Caroline told friends she would ‘rather die’ than have recordings from that night played in a public arena, and she wanted Green to help her.

Chief among Green’s concerns, he tells the Mail, was the strict ‘non-association’ bail condition imposed on Caroline to stop her contacting Burton – a former tennis player and model who she believed was cheating on her.

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

Normally, anyone accused of a crime is entitled to unconditional bail, particularly when they are of good character and the offence is minor in nature – both of which applied to Caroline Flack.

All the blood police found at the scene was hers. Burton was said to have a superficial cut on his head, which required no treatment. Green also says there was no ‘vulnerable victim’ – another usual requirement for bail conditions such as hers.

Burton himself made clear from the outset he did not want Caroline to face charges, refusing to make a statement in the hope this would lead to the charges being dropped. There were more points, says Green, that should have been taken into account.

‘There were no children involved,’ he says. ‘And Caroline had her own home to return to, independent of the boyfriend.’

He also stressed she was a mature woman of good character with no previous history of domestic abuse.

There was therefore no need for strict conditions and he believes Caroline was being treated as a ‘target criminal’.

‘I believe it was the invoking of this ‘no contact’ condition which sowed the seeds for her suicide,’ he says. ‘It ensured she remained isolated and emotional, and it impacted constantly on her fragile mental state.’

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

He says: ‘When I asked if she had applied to a Crown Court judge to remove the no-contact condition, she replied: ‘I was told not to.’ I spat out, ‘Why the hell not, Caroline?’ as all I was hearing, so far, was the power of the CPS and the vulnerability of Caroline.’

Green says Caroline told him she’d been advised to not challenge the order as the hearing would be covered by the Press – something she ‘couldn’t face’.

‘She told me she feared it would result in more media coverage, and that the prosecutor had threatened to play the body-cam footage. All my fears were being confirmed. All I got back, when I informed her that an appeal [to remove the ‘no-contact condition’] would be heard in the judge’s chambers and she would not have to be present, was ‘this is not what my lawyers have told me’. The more I heard, the more I disliked.

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

But he would never hear that again. Three weeks later, Caroline was found dead at 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 the Independent Office for Police Conduct has urged the Metropolitan Police to re-open its investigation into her daughter’s case.

The watchdog has recommended interviewing an officer who attended Caroline’s arrest and was said to have been involved in the move to overrule the CPS’s decision to issue her with a caution – something that left her ‘in pieces’, according to friends Louise Teasdale and Mollie Grosberg, who were at 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. Various accounts say they went briefly to the shops, others say they were told to leave by Caroline.

Now questions about this, as well as others, are being raised in a documentary on Disney+, fronted by Christine.

Green believes the star could have been saved.

‘Caroline was at her wits’ end with the failures and pressures on her,’ he tells me. Today he hopes to help Christine in her search for the truth about her daughter’s tragic death.