Chris Cornell’s widow has blamed medical examiners in Michigan for the hell her family has been through since the rocker’s death, insisting their suicide ruling opened the floodgates for online trolls.
A year after Chris took his own life by hanging himself in a Detroit hotel room hours after a Soundgarden gig in the city, Vicky Cornell admits she and the rest of the family are still “looking for answers” about his death, accusing medical experts of conducting a “botched investigation”.
And she’ll never forgive the trolls who have written “vile” things about the family in the wake of the tragic rock star’s passing.
“This has left me and my family still looking for answers, but at the same time, set off this whirlwind of conspiracies,” she adds. “Some of the people are just fans looking for answers, but some of them are conspiracy theorists who have said the most vile things to my children and me.
“Drugs did not contribute to the cause of death… The poor choice of phrasing has misled the public to believing he was of sound mind and body. So some conspiracy people think if Chris wasn’t impaired, he would never have killed himself, and so he must have been killed – and then they start getting into the rest of the holes.”
“(He) did not have control of his faculties due to toxicology,” she adds. “Had the medical examiner looked at all these factors, maybe they wouldn’t have concluded it was a suicide in just an hour and a half.”
Vicky recently staged a vigil at her late husband’s gravesite in Los Angeles to mark the first anniversary of his death, and she has thanked the fans and friends who joined her and Chris’ kids on the difficult day.
His bandmates Matt Cameron, Tom Morello, and Alain Johannes, and the widows of Chester Bennington and Johnny Ramone were among those who attended the memorial.
“Being back at Hollywood Forever… was stepping into a place that serves as a reminder of what I’ve lost, a missing piece that hurts so much,” Vicky said in a tweet, “but seeing you all and feeling so much love renewed my feelings of hope and gave me the strength to keep going, to continue to honor him and not lose sight of all I have to be grateful for.”
