Why did Reggie Watts’s ex take her own life?

+++++ Content warning: suicide ++++

This is a picture of Katherine McCollough taken about a year ago, standing at the bottom of the staircase in the Soho Theatre, Walthamstow where her boyfriend, the comedian Reggie Watts, was playing a couple of sold-out gigs on his European tour.

I go to the Soho to write most weeks, just yards from where she’s standing in the theatre’s foyer. Lots of writers do. They don’t mind you sitting there with a laptop if you buy a coffee and they even do discounts for the screenwriters’ group that meets there.

In the photo, she’s standing, her smile uncertain or perhaps shy, with an arm around the Watts cut-out advertising his tour show, like a fan would. She was so obviously proud to be with the guy from the TV, the one with probably millions of adoring fans all over the world.

And in particular, other comedians revere Reggie Watts. He’s the real deal.

In March, a few months after he dumped McCollough following a severe mental health episode she experienced, believed to have been brought on by her drug use, McCollough travelled to Peru to meet a man she’d connected with on a suicide web forum. She told no one she was going, left a note for her family and took her own life.

Reggie Watts is perhaps more known to UK audiences as the band leader on James Corden’s Late Late Show. His comedy career is buoyant with several filmed specials under his belt. His unique musical improvisations and word-salady diatribes set him apart from a lot of the more conventional talents on the stand-up circuit.

He is improvvy, a jazz comedian, a creative maverick who commands and confuses his audience in equal measure.

Today, Rolling Stone published an investigation into Watts, his romantic relationship with McCollough and several others. In particular it focuses on the alleged behaviour her family now say caused a fundamental and fatal change in the young woman they knew before.

Shortly after news of his ex’s death broke in March, Watts released a heartfelt post to her on his Instagram. I say heartfelt, it is actually devoid of emotion and just plain bizarre. Something in the caption mentions her but he starts by singing a few lines of On Blueberry Hill, then slips into a cod English accent and then, for what seems like a long time, makes noises off camera that sound like he might be snorting drugs, then he returns and seems to be nodding along to the music in his headphones.

At best, it’s self-indulgent, like watching him pleasing himself for several minutes. I think he eventually breaks into song again but I don’t know because I didn’t watch for that long. It’s certainly a unique way to grieve.

McCollough’s sister says in the piece that by the time her sister died, Watts was ignoring her if they were at the same events. He’d moved on.

The Rolling Stone piece is extensive and interviews five of Watts’ ex partners (all anonymously) and McCollough’s sister, Colleen. She directly states that she thinks Katherine would still be here if she hadn’t met Watts and become addicted to ketamine, thanks to his ‘encouragement’.

Watts has lawyered up. The article states:

Watts declined Rolling Stone’s multiple requests for an interview and did not specifically address a majority of questions posed to him in a detailed request for comment. However, his attorney, Andrew Brettler, said it was “dangerously false” and a “preconceived narrative” to suggest that Watts was responsible for McCollough’s suicide. Brettler also pushed back on Watts’ alleged prodding of McCollough to take drugs with him, claiming she was already an “experienced” drug user. “Ms. McCollough did not need any so-called ‘encouragement’ from him,” Brettler said in a statement.

His lawyer is Andrew Brettler. Former clients of Brettler include Chris D’elia (notorious on the US comedy circuit with scores of allegations made against him), Chris Noth, formerly Mr Big in Sex and the City and accused of sexual misconduct, Armie Hammer, Russell Brand and former Prince Andrew.

Reading through the accounts of the other women Watts dated, a pattern emerges pretty clearly. As per the article:

Watts’ needs prioritized above their own, the chipping away at their self-confidence, and the prompting to take substances with him.

I have heard other stories of older comedians, ‘encouraging’ their younger partners to take drugs, particularly during sex, as a way of ‘connecting’. They don’t insist and they don’t force them, but sulking and periods of silent treatment would follow if they said no. In most cases, the women gave in.

This particular type of man seems to prefer a woman who idolises him to the point of giving him everything he wants, even if it’s something the women themselves aren’t comfortable with.

This Reggie Watts story reminded me of the thoughts I had when I heard about Jim Carrey and his ex-girlfriend, Cathriona White, who took her own life in 2016.

Did you read this story at the time? Look at the details. Do you remember it from a decade ago? Weirdly few people seem to. Perhaps you have a vague memory of a tragic ex but the story seemed to go away so maybe you didn’t think anything of it.

In reporting from the time, not only was it alleged that Carrey’s relationship with the much younger Irish make-up artist was coercive and controlling, he is alleged by White, to have given her an STD, to have introduced sex workers into the relationship, to have encouraged class A drug use despite her history of mental illness and that the prescription drugs with which she went on to kill herself were actually prescribed to Carrey. That is, to the false name he used to obtain medication.

It was even alleged that Carrey sent texts to make it seem as though White had taken the drugs from his home without his knowledge, so he wouldn’t be implicated.

She left lengthy notes on her iPad before she died, saying that the relationship with Carrey had emotionally broken her.

It’s all very much alleged. He is seen in pictures at her funeral, carrying the coffin and looking stricken.

He supposedly told the family he would pay for everything. They never heard from him after that day. No payment was made.

The easiest thing for our brains to do in these situations is to begin excusing the famous man because it does rather sound as though the women were ‘mad’, ‘unreliable’.

You don’t want to damn someone based purely on the ramblings of a drug addict or an hysterical, fragile basket case. So you just allow the harrowing details of their stories to blur like a painting in the rain, safe in the knowledge it’ll all be washed away by morning.

We do this again and again with women who simply describe their terrible experiences to us.

Reggie Watts, at time of writing, has not responded to all of the other allegations in the Rolling Stone piece. An already blurry situation is made blurrier still by all of the drugs and the cloudy recollections. With his reported daily use of ket and weed, I bet his memory is full of holes.

He is a self-styled noncomformist who uses drugs and likes to spend time with other people who also use drugs. How could any woman in a relationship with him not know that? And anyway, she was an adult. She could have just refused the drugs. He didn’t hold a gun to anyone’s head.

My read of it is this: an open, beautiful woman with already flimsy emotional boundaries fell into an infatuation with an heroic-seeming man who told her he’d take care of her. He told her to leave her life behind and she did.

The piece relates:

McCollough felt a need to be near Watts constantly, fearing he would lose interest if she didn’t accompany him to events. As a result, she became his shadow.

She walked away from a law career and became an adjunct to her older, famous lover. It happens. But that dynamic doesn’t usually just ‘happen’, it is created by the person who stands to benefit from it.

She was willing to do anything to be with him, according to her sister. But even that wasn’t enough in the end and when she became unwell, he lost interest and left her in a psych ward while he went home to sleep off the latest binge. (He did visit her later that week, he says.)

Every piece I write when I read one of these stories ends the same way. Look to the women. How many women? Do they tell a similar story? What does that tell you? How’s your pattern recognition? Can you see one, or is this just the mess of human interaction played out on a grand stage and none of our business? The result of wild, creative people accidentally hurting one another because hey, the ketamine will do that to you.

Do we even have the right to know what famous men do to women when no one else can see?

I know some people on the British comedy circuit who are pretty devastated today. Some of them hung out with him at Latitude festival just last month. I’m not going to judge anyone who doesn’t immediately turn their back on him. I know that’s not how this works.

There are hierarchies and he’s somewhere up near the top and they felt their proximity to him said good things about their place in the hierarchy too. They’d need to be 100% before they throw that away.

But I see a pattern and I can’t un-see it.

My brain is just that way and I can’t do anything about it. Five women say Reggie Watts treated them badly and caused them distress and I can’t understand how anyone having read that piece, could want to be around him now.

I guess I’m just weird.

If you’re interested in stand-up comedy and narcissistic abuse and how the two so often seem to go together, you could…

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