Cause of Death Revealed for Sinead O'Connor—Double Custody Crisis Victim
And: Update on Bre's Case
Sinead O’Connor was found dead in her London apartment last year. Although authorities assured the public it was not due to foul play, the cause of death was never revealed. It has finally been announced.
The 56-year-old Irish, iconic singer/songwriter, protester of Catholic Church abuse, reportedly died of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and asthma, exacerbated by a respiratory infection. The infectious pathogen was not identified.
Sinead’s last tearful posts before her death had shown she was still very distressed following her son Shane’s suicide the year before. She was struggling with bouts of severe depression and had once declared publicly she wanted to “follow him”, indicating suicidal ideation.
The withholding of her cause of death led to speculation that she may have followed through on her thoughts of suicide. That appears to be wrong and could easily have been dispelled if the cause of death had been released earlier. It is unclear why the family did not.
If the reporting is true, and there is no reason to believe it is not, it appears suicide was not the cause. Sinead, the grieving mother, had managed to stay strong after all to the end, despite both childhood and maternal traumas.
Sinead had endured the loss of custody of two of her four children to two different exes. Both Shane and her only daughter had been taken away from her via Family Court.
So Sinead was a double Custody Crisis victim: two times by two different exes. If such a famous, talented, wealthy woman does not have the power to keep her children, no woman does.
But then, we at Women’s Coalition International already know that…
SINEAD’S STORY
Sinead was born in Dublin in 1966. Her mother was seriously physically and emotionally abusive, which led to her having symptoms and behaviors caused by trauma.
Sinead was placed in a Catholic behavioral modification program, where she was further abused. Later she was placed in a boarding school, but she soon dropped out to pursue her first love: music. She had been gifted with the “voice of an angel”.
Her mother died in a car crash when she was 18, and, despite the abuse, Sinead was crushed by her death. This compounded her existing complex trauma.
Sinead was discovered as a teen and her first album The Lion and the Cobra, was released in 1987 when she was just 20 years old. It was called a “sensation” and nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.
That same year, Sinead gave birth to her first son; she married the father two years later. They separated not long after but co-parented with no problems. She always spoke fondly of her first husband.
Her breakthrough hit Nothing Compares 2 U, a song written by Prince, was released in 1990. That was when Sinead shot to international fame. She also gained attention for shaving her head and wearing baggy clothes in protest of women having to look “feminine”.
During a Saturday Night Live performance in 1992, Sinead tore up a photograph of the Pope in protest of the systemic sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
This angered a wide swath of religious folk and she was basically exiled from the U.S. She would later be exonerated as the scope of the cover up of clergy sexual abuse began to be revealed. This awareness culminated in the movie Spotlight, which won many 2016 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. So she was way ahead of her time.
In 1994, Sinead became pregnant with her daughter by someone she referred to at the time as a “friend”. She gave birth in ‘95 and just a year later, this “friend” filed for sole custody of her baby. It took three years of litigating in Family Court, but he won, of course, and she lost her baby. The good news is that her relationship with her daughter later healed, but so much is lost when deprived of those childhood years together.
This taking of her baby was Sinead’s first experience of the Custody Crisis. She did not know there were hundreds of thousands of women, perhaps millions, around the world who had experienced the same thing.
The loss of her baby daughter added to Sinead’s history of trauma. But she stayed strong and carried on.
In 2004, Sinead gave birth to her second son, Shane. She did not marry his father and remained Shane’s primary bond and nurturer until he was 11. Regardless, sole custody was awarded to the father via Family Court and she was placed on supervised visits.
The Coalition followed Sinead’s custody battle from 2017, 18 months after Shane was taken away from her and she began speaking out publicly about it. She bravely wrote an open letter threatening a hunger strike and suicide in protest over the unjust Family Court ruling unless she regained custody.
If I am not restored to my child…I promise you in the name of God I will become the first Irish citizen to take their life in protest…You’ll have a dead celebrity on your hands, and a lot of explaining to do. I will not go quietly. But I WILL go.
We should never have been separated…You have left me with nothing to lose.
This strategy is shades of the hunger strike, a tradition in Old Ireland. You starve yourself on someone's doorstep until justice is done and restitution is made. A dead body holds accountable the powers-that-be who have inflicted the injustice. American suffragette Alice Paul used a hunger strike while in prison to protest women’s disenfranchisement.
The Women’s Coalition publicized Sinead’s letter and quest to have custody returned to her and launched a campaign to the Irish Prime Minister: Sinead O’Connor Threatens Suicide in Open Letter if Son Not Returned. He responded by saying that he was sorry but he did not have power over Family Court.
This loss of custody compounded Sinead’s existing trauma immensely. However, she did go on to have another son with a good man and he was not taken from her. So there was something good in her life to counteract all the bad.
And then the final blow.
Shane ended his life in 2022 at 17-years-old after years of struggling with depression. His mental health struggles were undoubtedly caused by having been taken away from his mother, his primary bond, with whom he had been so very close. He did not have depression before taken from her.
For a more in-depth look at the circumstances surrounding Shane’s life and death, see our previous column: Sinead O’Connor’s Son Ends His Life: Family Court Is To Blame. It is the most viewed of all our columns.
This last trauma, on top of all the others, was nearly too much for Sinead to bear.
He was the love of my life, the lamp of my soul. We were one soul in two halves. He was the only person who loved me unconditionally. I am lost in the bardo without him.
Sinead would die the next year, last year, reportedly as a result of the culmination of COPD and asthma, exacerbated by a respiratory infection.
RIP Sinead and Shane
TAKEAWAYS
Sinead’s is one of the saddest of Custody Crisis stories, having lost her son to suicide subsequent to the unjust Family Court ruling. But it is just one of many.
Shane’s fatality adds to the numerous children who have died by suicide, drug overdose or murder following a judge giving custody to an abusive or self-serving father. Countless children around the world are suffering today, not to mention all the adults traumatized as children by the Family Court system and the mothers who fought for them.
Sinead was labelled “mentally ill” in order to justify taking Shane away from her. But, although Sinead suffered from depression, she had never abused him and was not a danger to him. Labeling a mother “mentally ill” is a common tactic used in Family Court to justify switching custody to the father.
“Mentally ill” is just a convenient label to facilitate switching custody. Most mothers trying desperately to keep their child(ren) in lengthy, expensive custody battles experience distress and/or anxiety so it is a very convenient label. Make her crazy then call her crazy. But the truth is, even if Sinead’s judge hadn’t used “mental illness” to switch custody, he would have just used something/anything else.
Finally, note that Sinead was fit enough to keep custody of two of her children: because the father did not want custody. The two fathers who wanted custody, got it.
And that is the moral of the story: When a father wants to take children away from the mother, regardless of facts or evidence or how loving and wonderful a mother is, Family Court is there to enable it.
Patriarchal ownership of children is still alive and well today—unbeknownst to most women. The best kept secret.
Help us get the word out to all women!
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IN OTHER NEWS
Bre’s Ex Sentenced to 25 Years
In Custody Crisis victim Bre’s case, her ex was sentenced on Friday to 25 years in prison for the murder of her son, Corey. A jury convicted him of aggravated manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a child, rather than 2nd degree murder.
In a widely-publicized trial, including live coverage on Court TV, the public and a jury heard how Little Corey’s father had abused him over the course of years. Everyone came to know how the injuries he inflicted on Corey on his final court-ordered visit caused the boy’s death.
Bre’s case stands out as her son’s death came the day after she was denied a Restraining Order against the father.
We told her story in 2022: Father Indicted for Murdering Son. This was followed up with coverage of the criminal trial this June: Mom Gets Justice for Son: Ex Convicted in "Treadmill Abuse Trial".
SISTERS IN SOLIDARITY
There will be no SIS meeting this month to allow for a summer break. See you in September!
If you’d like to join SIS, please fill out this form. More info here.
ALIENATED MOTHERS ALLIANCE
If you have been made an alienated mother via Family Court, you are welcome to join our Alienated Mothers Alliance.
We are supporting each other and getting the word out that the most common, worst outcome of Custody Crisis cases is our children being alienated from us. Please fill out this form.
SAGA OF ONE F**KED MOTHER
Chapter 25 is out—don’t miss it! This is the last chapter before Book 3 begins—the Family Court custody battle part of the Saga.
“Many Men of Conscience” is Chapter 25 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother.
It’s MLKing Day ’89 and just a couple weeks before the first custody trial. Herry tells Legion all men lust after other women every day, so the divorce is her fault for being so puritan. Her father assures her accountable men, “men of conscience” do not. She realizes the marriage counseling was intended to accomplish this woman-blame. But Legion will not go along with this gaslighting—she’ll stand her ground and it will make her stronger. She also realizes the Spanish verb “aprovechar”, to take, can also mean to “swindle,” “to screw the hell out of” and that describes Herry perfectly—as the taker and screwer he is.
Being MLK Day, Legion recognizes that even MLKing, despite all his agitating for peace and freedom and equality, does not apply these principles to the most oppressed in society: women. In fact, he takes advantage of his own male prerogative.
This is the last chapter in Book 2. Book 3 begins with the first Family Court trial.
In the last chapter, Legion realizes she is not upset about divorcing Herry. He was not the love of her life, and his inability to care or connect on a level deeper than pure physical meant, in the end, he had always been just a sex object.
Legion remembers her youngest son at 22-years-old admitting that he not only did not remember his childhood before being taken away from her, but that he did not want to remember it. All those years of love and nurturing and fun—gone. This is an example of how cognitive dissonance causes kids to dissociate off memories of their mother, but they still exist in the subconscious. It is just too painful for children to remember, and hence feel again, the love and good times they had with mom. Perpetrators and their Family Court enablers take full advantage of this psychological survival mechanism in their agenda to maintain men’s control over their children.
Dr. Blue’s novel is based on her own experience of the Custody Crisis. It uniquely conveys how Family Court judges are “mother-fucking” women—a form of systemic oppression and violence directed at ex-wives—as protagonist Legion is systematically and methodically deprived of her children and money and reduced to “one fucked mother”.
Chapters are stand-alone interesting so you can begin reading anywhere. A Cast of Characters follows to help readers at any point [on the web page]. All published chapters are included in the Section: “Saga of One F**ked Mother” accessible on the top bar of the home page of Women’s Coalition News & Views. Sequential chapters are published every Wednesday and subscribers will find them in their inboxes, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet!
TEASERS
I shall become hardened, steeled. A ring of steel around my finger, no longer a gold ring, a ring of steel around all of myself. Tougher and stronger than I had ever previously thought myself capable of … becoming!
That is the aprovechar insult to us four which AmTaham is helping me to stop you from taking from us. You cannot be around me and around my children and keep on taking from us our dignity and our integrity like that. So in the order of things that, … that … is why you are gone, Pillar of the Community Doctor Edinsmaier! You can have it all, the dissing, the disrespect and the disloyalty and the distrust and the disconnect – your unaccountability, Herry – but now? Now … you order it up from others. Not from us four. Not anymore.
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Family court judges do not act in the best interests of the child. Children are dying. Patriarchy dominates family court. Children are treated as male property. Males that request child custody usually get it. It doesn't matter if they're abusive. It doesn't matter if they have psychiatric issues and are violent. Stepfathers are getting custody. Female citizens are losing custody to male noncitizens. Family court judges often falsely find loving mothers unfit. They separate good mothers and their children. Depression and anxiety are common. Women and children become helpless and hopeless. Family court judges endanger women and children. They seal records. Facts and laws make no difference in family court. Complaints to the disciplinary committee do no good. Family court judges suffer no consequences. Their opinion is what matters. Women and children have no enforceable rights in family court. They have no protection. Women and children are dying. Family court judges abuse their power. They must no longer have the power to do so. We need a new system. Juries offer women a better chance at justice. Family court must end.
She died at home. The cause of death would have presented with an obvious need to immediate medical intervention, which she failed to seek. It is suicide by making the choice to neglect to seek care. They can call it anything they want, but Shuhada' Sadaqat's true cause of death is suicide. The catalyst was family court.