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