This story is from http://thefetishistas.com/index.php?menu=1_60&sub=22&display=326
(Thanks to Tony for the great story and picture.)
Veronica Hoffman, one of the international fetish scene’s most colourful characters, has died in Los Angeles aged 29. A lifetime sufferer with bipolar disorder, she is said to have taken her own life following a severe bout of depression.
As Mistress Veronica, she was highly regarded as a pro domme — she learnt her craft at LA’s famous Dominion establishment — and in recent years she had successfully combined this career with fetish modelling in the studio and on the catwalk, where she was extremely popular.
Though she was based in LA, you were as likely to bump into her here in London as at the LA Kink Ball, the German Fetish Ball in Berlin, Wasteland in Amsterdam, Fetish Factory’s Anniversary parties in Florida or Kink In The Caribbean in Jamaica.
She was also a promising photographer and writer who combined these skills with her love of fetish parties to great effect in occasional event reports for The Fetishistas.
Like most bipolar people, she did her best not to publicise her condition, but it was well known to her closest friends, and seemed to be largely manageable with the medication she was taking.
However, earlier this year, she entered a manic phase of unprecedented severity which resulted in her being hospitalised. The first sign to her friends that something was seriously wrong came when they began to receive a series of largely baffling e-mails from this normally erudite individual.
According to her boyfriend, music producer and film soundtrack composer Joseph Bishara, she was in and out of hospitals for three or four months during the first half of 2009 before she finally started to emerge from the mania.
“But then the depression kicked in, she started to remember all the things she’d done, and was horrified she’d had such a public meltdown,˘ he told me in a sad phone call on Tuesday from Toronto. He had been working on the mix of a movie there when she died.
He said he was hoping to fly back to Los Angeles the following day, to meet Veronica’s family — some in nearby Santa Barbara and others coming in from Texas and Georgia — to organise a memorial service for this coming Saturday (August 8).
She had already attempted suicide once, he revealed, but had been saved by a friend who was staying at her dungeon at the time. “I took her to Cedars Sinai, where they adjusted her medication, and it looked like she was getting better,” he said. Unfortunately, it seems that the improvement was temporary.
On Sunday, with Joseph in Toronto, she took advantage of a brief absence of the same friend who’d saved her before and was still watching her, to make a second suicide attempt. Sadly this time she was successful.
She would have been 30 in November. She was one of my dearest friends; life without will never be the same, and I know many others will feel just the same.
Accordingly, we are now planning a Fetishistas celebration of Veronica’s brief but stellar contribution to our world — a reminder of her capacity for brightening up so many lives despite the demons she battled.
We therefore invite photographers and models who shot with her and fetish folk with entertaining anecdotes about her (and boy there must be plenty of those!) to participate in our tribute.
Please send your Veronica stories and pictures to tony@thefetishistas.com and we’ll publish as many of them as we can. Thank you. TONY MITCHELL
(Editor’s note: this article has been updated since first posting to correct some minor factual errors)
Thursday, 6 August 2009
Sad, Sad, Sad.
BPD is no shit.
very sad… What’s fucked up is that a lot of the drugs that are used to treat depression can excaserbate suicidal thoughts… and I had a horrible public meltdown once too, it fuckin sucks, and Cindi knows what I’m talking about
HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!
I KNOW THIS GIRL… KNEW THIS GIRL. I WAS STANDING AT AN ATM A FEW WEEKS AGO. She looked real normal, cute, civilian like. She was standing behind me as I was with my friend on line at the Chase ATM, she started talking to me. I ended up catching up to her and talking to her on the street as she had just finished talking to the Lyndon Larouchees on Sunset / Vine. My friend decided to go to Amoeba records and she asked me to walk with her to he place. She started telling me her dad tried to kill himself once. She told me she had a dungeon and was a mistress. I then told her I’m in the porn business and then she invited me inside, said she was looking for a roommate, as hers moved and and rent was about 3 or 4,000 per month there on Las Palmas and Sunset. I hung out briefly and left and that was the last time I saw or spoke with her. I had invited her to a fetish party but never heard back from her. She told me she liked making out with pretty gay boys. She also showed me one of those crescent shaped metal ring anal g-shot toys. I think she was interested to know if I was into that.
Sad, I still have her phone number in my cell.
I just want everyone to know I’m done bitching from now on………… it’s all a bunch of bullshit and not worth the precious time we have in life………
how did she end it?
her myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/mistressveronica
L.A is a hard place to grow up in. There’s so many phony’s and people who like ussing people here, with no real intentions of wanting anything but to hurt as many people as possible. It’s sad that some suffer with life threatening sadness. Sadness sucks, been there, done that, a lot of people including myself suffer with bouts of sadness. My grandfather said when he was still alive, when things look there bleakest, there’s no were to go but up. Family helps, my dad has given me a lot of insight into how men think, so that’s helped me to stop myself from being used. Depression is an ongoing fight to hold on and not to give into. There was a movie about an older lady who falls in love with a younger guy and she let’s him marry a younger women, but both were the only ones for each other. Years later when he realizes that she was the love of his life, he blows his head off. I’ve lost someone like that, I haven’t gone that far, but knowing even when I’m with someone else, that it’s never going to be like that, is extreamly painful. So I know how painful sadness is and I take one day at a time and when things don’t work out or people hate me for no reason. I try to stay away from the I’d be better off dead feelings. But when those emotions go over board you should seek help imediatly, because chances are you’ll take your own life. It’s really not that hard to do and people need to watch and care enough about there family and friends, so they won’t have to go to a funeral. I’ve done that, my dads best friend commited suicide a guy I knew since age 5, it’s the only time I’ve seen him cry. When his kids spoke and said they went to school in the morning and everything was OK and when they got back, their dad was dead, every one in the church was crying. I’m not that selfish, suicide really hurts friends, family and loved ones, its tragic.
That is really sad. 🙁