To be honest, I have always felt Richey would not have been the healthiest person to be around. Reading interviews reminds me of an ex-boyfriend, who was both emotionally abusive and mentally unwell. Alcoholism and self harm are hard to deal with from the outside as well as the inside, and shitty behaviour is shitty behaviour, regardless of the underlying reason. Excusing it as ‘genius’ or ‘a tortured soul’ is to dismiss both the person’s struggles and those affected by them.
I’m not going to trawl back through all the comments, but whoever said you dehumanise a person by deamonising or canonising them was spot on.
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