I realised at some point a few years ago that Britney Spears’s death, whenever it comes, will hit me like a truck. Friends and I had been talking about the celebrities that had shaped us and, among the women at least, a consensus had quickly emerged. Britney had been so important to us during our childhoods, and had been such a steady presence in our lives since then, that any accident or tragedy would simply feel personal. Like a messy, troubled, yet relentlessly endearing older sister, the singer felt part of our collective family.
I still believe this today, even as I watch her post increasingly concerning videos to Instagram, and realise that the person I idolised as a tween is long gone, and unlikely to ever return. Britney Spears is, for better or worse, a part of me.
That isn’t surprising to me, though. What I failed to anticipate was that the death of another complicated, endearingly ditzy, got-too-famous-too-young woman would leave me feeling devastated. You may have heard of her before; you probably haven’t.
Because the tabloids love being trashy and senseless, the Daily Mirror called her the “TV star who had sex in French Big Brother pool” in the headline of their online obituary. In a way, they weren’t wrong: the televised tryst is what brought Loana Petrucciani to the public eye in the first place.
In fact, it’s hard to explain the extent to which the public eye focused on that one story at the time. The year was 2001, and Loft Story, as they called it, was the country’s first encounter with reality television. The concept – this idea that regular people would spend their evenings watching other, regular people exist day after day – felt entirely absurd, yet somehow it worked.
I was both nine years old and the child of quite snobbish parents when it aired, so I wasn’t allowed to watch it. Still, I could probably pick several of the participants out of a line-up today, a quarter of a century later. Loft Story took France by storm, and this one scene, where Loana and Jean-Édouard went at it in the pool, remains etched in my memory. I couldn’t even tell you how or when or why I watched it. It just became part of the national psyche that year.
It also launched Loana’s career, as the former stripper then went on to win the show, and became unavoidable for several years – for better or worse. As was so often the case back in the noughties, people clearly craved her presence in the public eye yet deeply resented her success. Her first single – Comme je t’aime – was both wildly successful and broadly panned.
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Still, somehow, I’ve now had it stuck in my head for days. I probably haven’t heard it for over 20 years, and I don’t believe I ever listened to it on purpose, yet here it is, etched on my soul. I can picture the music video as well, and the butterfly top she was wearing, and which all the adults in my life considered so gauche and vulgar. Loana was a part of my childhood, and now she has died, without even reaching 50.
It probably goes without saying that her life, both before and after she found fame, was a difficult one. Her upbringing was tough and she already was quite broken and blatantly too trusting by the time she reached the big time. You can imagine what happened to her after that – the relationships with the men who only wanted to use then break her, and her various attempts at remaining in the public eye, both encouraged and mocked by a cruel press which nevertheless couldn’t get enough of her.
Of course, now she has died, the tributes will not stop pouring in. It’s 2026 and we, as a country, get to look back on our past sins and feel proud that we just wouldn’t act like this today. We feel sorry for Loana – for what France put her through – and we recognise that all of it went rather too far.
It’s just that, well – it’s too late for her, isn’t it? She’s gone and she’s not going to see any of it. She died for our sins without even meaning to do so. She was wounded and probably not very sharp and she enjoyed the brief, healing warmth of the spotlight and none of that ought to have been a crime.
Then again, I’m probably being a hypocrite as well. I mocked her as people mocked her; like countless others. I then spent years forgetting about her very existence, then occasionally dipping into Wikipedia to check in on her latest ups and downs. I felt sorry for her but probably judged her too, because it made me feel good. I was a part of the problem, as the whole country was.
What now, then? Maybe it will be a wake-up call, for me and others. Maybe we can start treating our fragile, needy, famous women a bit better, even if it sometimes feels like they’re feeding on our scorn. I can’t speak for others, but I guess I’ll try to make that her legacy. It’s the least I can do for her.
