chandellina - if they were anything like my mum - they were probably still trying to work out whatever they'd written in shorthand said three weeks later!
Even more terrible to find out that the PR's "consent" isn't as cast-iron as the Guardian was saying it was. It's absolutely sickened me - I've never been a Lily Allen fan, but god it was painful reading knowing how events panned out (obviously heavily coloured by my own personal experience) and just being able to have some understanding.
I too reckon they'd hung on to the interview (joking about shorthand aside) in the hope of something happening, or running it after the birth or something - the timing's just too bizarre... or they'd decided the interview wasn't actually newsworthy at all with her new lower profile and weren't going to pull it - till bad things happened and someone found it mouldering on a desk in the office somewhere.
I sent an email complaining last night - which will no doubt be ignored (and no doubt the grammar on it is attrocious with the red mist I was typing it through).
fishes through her sent items to copy/paste
I'm disgusted, gutter journalism at it's worst.
To open with the comments that "Parts of what Allen said are almost too painful to bear now, for just 10 days after we met she lost her baby" yet to run the article anyway - is utterly utterly despicable. It's intentional and callous to generate a wave of outcry and thus visitors to the site - so I guess it succeded then.
To leave, unedited, the final paragraph: "I ask her when she has been happiest. "Now." And unhappiest? "I suppose after my miscarriage, that was a pretty awful time."But you know, on the flip side, two years later I'm in a really happy relationship, in the house of my dreams, and about to have a baby, which is what I've always wanted" is, whatever her PR people said, akin to pouring acid an open wound of her grief.
WHATEVER her PR people said - if that poor woman picks up the newspaper, she's going to be reminded of the hopes, dreams and future she planned out which she's now been robbed of. She's going to be brutally reminded about how happy she was before the latest tragedy happened - and she's going to hurt, more than you can possibly imagine. I suffer from recurrent miscarriages - one of the hardest parts of the grief each loss causes you is those moments you become aware of the utterly stark before and after contrast - from your world being so full of hope and looking to the future, to, within the space of a few days, the world becoming bleak, cold and unbearably painful. Printing your article is like rubbing her nose in the hopes and dreams she's currently grieving for.
It's also excruciatingly painful to read as someone who most recently miscarried two months ago. All of the women I've spoken to affected by miscarriage have said similar - it reminds them of the moment in THEIR lives that the world faded from a brightly coloured summer day of looking to the future... to the grey and black of their post-loss grief. It reminds them of the feelings they had of thinking they were going to be a mother, and how stupid they subsequently felt when everything was so quickly lost - and you DO feel stupid, you feel stupid, naive, like you were somehow a fake "playing" at being an expectant mother. All those feelings - rush right back to the fore again when I read her interview.
Publishing it wasn't an act of raising awareness, it wasn't an act of responsible journalism, it was mawkish voyerism, a "look what we got - the bird who lost her baby talking about it all before she lost it - I bet the other guys haven't got that." It was disgusting, insensitive, and, as the child of a family of journalists, it makes me hang my head in shame at the depths a generally-regarded as decent newspaper has sunk to.
You can sit and gloat about it all you want on the mindless e-tit-for-tat that is Twitter - there are hundreds of thousands of people out there disgusted by the newspaper's actions in this. If you consider miscarriage affects anywhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 pregnancies in the UK - that's an awful lot of very offended people, before we add in those who are just genuinely decent folk who also think it was a disgusting action.
I'm not the most eloquent at expressing my views in a written form at the best of times - especially when actions render me speechless - as this has done. Even the much derided Daily Mail approached the reporting of the story with more tact and sensitivity - not qualities it's generally known for!
Yours disgustedly,
Mrs Very Very Cross (obviously not how I signed it off really)