Trinny Woodall opens up about ‘regrets’ after ex-husband’s suicide

Trinny Woodall has said there was ‘nothing she could have done’ about her ex-husband Johnny Elichaoff’s suicide.

Woodall and Elichaoff got married in 1999 and split 10 years later, with Elichaoff dying by taking his own life in 2014, aged 55.

He fell to his death from a car park roof following a 20-year battle with a painkiller addiction.

On Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place podcast, the 61-year-old reflected on the former drummer and businessman’s death and praised the work of charities looking into mental health and suicide.

Asked about her regrets by Cotton, the makeup mogul said: ‘I think going back to earlier, it’s that would’ve, should’ve, could’ve—so do I regret that I didn’t do more for my ex-husband to stop him killing himself? No, because there was nothing I could have done.

‘So to ponder on the regret of somebody who kills himself, it can take you into the darkest hole, but you can also know when somebody who is in that situation switches off, and that is their path, and nobody can get in. I had to learn.’

Woodall said there are ‘fabulous charities’ working in the area of mental health and suicide, which she said is the biggest cause of death in men under 50.

The former What Not To Wear host went on to speak about how she guided her daughter Lyla, who was 11 at the time, through Elichaoff’s death.

‘When I heard about Lyla’s dad, Lyla was at school, and my first challenge was how can I even tell her, how can I say the words to tell her,’ she explained.

‘My sister was a friend of a woman called Julia Samuel, who wrote an amazing book, Grief Works, and she’s fantastic.

‘Julia came around to our house, and I just said, “I need some words”, and so she said, “You’re going to tell her he had a heart attack in his head”.

‘We told her (Lyla), and she screamed really loudly, and it was like an animal scream, and then 20 minutes later she’s downstairs getting a snack, so children’s absorption of what has happened is that there’s that gut; she really loved her dad.’

Woodall said Lyla at the time ‘couldn’t quite understand’ her father’s death until they had the cremation that created ‘a real awareness.’

‘There’s a lot of people saying, “I’m so sorry about your dad, Lyla,” so she’s manic a little, she was running around with her friends, and then there was a memorial only 10 days after that, and there were 1,200 people in the church,’ Woodall continued.

‘Lyla got up and read If (the poem by Rudyard Kipling), but she didn’t read it; she said it with nothing and didn’t cry, and it wasn’t that she was being strong.’

Elsewhere on the podcast, the beauty entrepreneur, who founded Trinny London, was also asked if she regrets taking drugs for a decade after overcoming her addiction issues in her twenties.

She added: ‘I actually don’t, because it gave me such a depth of having to deal with life at an early age, some testing things that it rounded me up more as a person.

‘When I got into my 30s, I had a lot of experience to draw on to be resilient, so thereby I don’t regret that it happened, and I should draw upon it.’

Woodall expanded to RTE in 2023: ‘I’ve had many life lessons that made me look at myself differently. When I realised I couldn’t use drugs and I had to stop, that was a tough life lesson. And I thought I could never stop—I was so scared I could never stop.

‘But I did. And the strength it took to stop brought with it a whole load more fear, because when you stop using a substance [and] end up in rehab, they sort of peel back the layers of an onion, and you’re left feeling that everything that’s been a band-aid, which you put on that onion, has been removed. And you’re like, “but I have no support here,” and feel very raw and wobbly.’