Almost 11 years have passed since musician Thomas Cohen made the most distressing discovery imaginable – his wife, Peaches, dead from a heroin overdose, in the spare room of their home in Wrotham, Kent.
At her side was their 11-month-old son, Phaedra, who could have been with his mother’s body for up to 17 hours before Thomas, worried when Peaches hadn’t returned his calls, went to the house and found them both.
Thankfully their older son, Astala, then two, had been staying with his grandparents in South London at the time while he was busy with rehearsals.
The tragedy was both desperate and profound, all the more so because of the terrible sense of history repeating itself: Peaches, the blonde, vivacious 25-year-old middle daughter of TV personality Paula Yates and Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof, was just 11 years old when her mother died from an accidental heroin overdose in 2000.
Paula had been left grief-stricken after the suicide of her lover, the Australian lead singer and founder of supergroup INXS Michael Hutchence, three years earlier.
After finding himself a widower and single father at the age of 23, Thomas stepped out of the spotlight and was scarcely seen as he devoted his life to raising the boys, now aged 12 and 11, at his home in north Kent.
But now it seems he’s found love again. While known to have been ‘quietly’ in a romantic relationship with ‘body-positivity model’ and influencer Yasmin El Yassini since 2019, they recently confirmed that they are indeed a couple.
In a rare comment on his private life, Thomas declared: ‘It’s a relief to actually be able to love someone.’
Thomas Cohen poses with his partner Yasmin El Yassini, the pair looking strikingly similar in matching white vintage dresses, both with long, dark pre-Raphaelite curls
Thomas met Yasmin, 30, in 2014 – the year that Peaches died – but it was some time before they became an item.
He’d briefly dated model Daisy Lowe, once a friend of Peaches, and more briefly Zoe Bleu, the daughter of American actress Rosanna Arquette.
But there is a sense that his life has been changed by Yassini, who is half-Moroccan and half-German and was largely raised in Berlin.
Like Thomas, she is a devotee of transcendental meditation – a silent, non-religious practice said to help with stress relief and promote higher states of consciousness. In some circles, they are known as a ‘transcendental meditation power couple’.
She recently featured on his Instagram page after they posed for a moody, black-and-white photo shoot – looking strikingly similar in matching white vintage dresses, both with long, dark pre-Raphaelite curls.
Her Instagram name is ‘Opheliathanatos’ – perhaps a reference to the famous Millais portrait of Shakespeare’s doomed heroine Ophelia, floating down the river.
His Instagram name, meanwhile, is ‘Sylph’ and he sometimes dresses androgynously in dresses and knee-high boots.
In a rather more conventional vein, the two of them recently attended a special screening of Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Juror #2, in London.
Thomas embraces his former wife Peaches Geldof in 2012. The model sadly passed away two years later from a heroin overdose
On that occasion Thomas, 34, looked Gothically dapper in a dark suit and glasses, while Yasmin wore a beautiful, figure-hugging grey silk dress. She is apparently now hoping to pivot from her successful career as a model to do more acting work, which might account for their joint appearance on the red carpet.
It has been celebrated as a welcome sign that Thomas has been able to build a happy life for him and his boys.
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy in April 2014, such joy and peace must have seemed impossible, as caring for the boys’ needs was all-consuming.
Speaking of those early days, he once recalled: ‘It must have been an hour after I’d found her, it was time for the kids’ lunch. They needed it. So I took the children’s chairs to the table, took the yoghurts out of the fridge, the bananas. After that, the police escorted us away.’
Initially, he and the boys lived in south London with his parents – both grounded, committed socialists who met on a kibbutz. His mother, Sue, is an artist while his father, Keith, is a social worker for Lewisham council. There was support, too, from Bob and the Geldof family, to whom he has remained very close.
Thomas spoke of finding the routines of childhood helpful as he grieved, telling an interviewer on German TV in 2016: ‘I think the most important thing is to give them stability and safety after losing their mother so early. They have now lived longer than they knew their mother. They were just one and two years at the time. They are, miraculously, having happy childhoods.’
Peaches and Thomas’s romance and marriage had been a whirlwind. They met in 2010, were expecting their first child in 2011 and married in September 2012, at the same church in Davington, Kent, where her parents had tied the knot 26 years earlier. It was also where her mother’s funeral was held in 2000.
But Peaches was struggling with addiction, and had been on a methadone programme for two years before she died. She’d apparently been ‘clean’ for some time before taking her fatal overdose with drugs, it was believed, that she’d stashed in a box in the spare bedroom.
Thomas had always known his wife was struggling to break free of drug addiction.
Two years after her death he told an interviewer: ‘I think she thought the children would close the gap. But that does not work. Heroin makes you feel something that’s better than life. This is the terrible thing – you are feeding your body with something that will kill you.’
He told another interviewer: ‘Any time you love someone… when they have addiction issues and the border of life and death is so constant and close and intertwined throughout the whole thing, it’s heightened. But that doesn’t take away from any of the experience or relationship.’
Last year, however, Thomas talked about going on a spiritual journey which had finally, decisively allowed him to move on from his grief.
Bob Geldof and Paula Yates smile with daughters Fifi Trixiebelle and newborn Peaches – who was only 11 when her mother also died from a heroin overdose in 2000
‘I had some form of PTSD,’ he said. ‘I had an image which kept on repeating and it was a vast amount of my reality.’
This might perhaps have been his final sight of Peaches. We know that it played on his mind as he described it in the lyrics of a song, titled Country Home, in 2016.
In it, he sings: ‘Why weren’t her eyes covered and closed?’
Asked by an interviewer if it was about seeing Peaches’s body, he said: ‘Yes. Almost every lyric is brutal. So there’s no guessing. If you die in your sleep you probably have your eyes shut, if not then they’re probably open. I’m not a doctor. I don’t really have expectations of what a dead body should be.’
He discovered transcendental meditation after watching a documentary about George Harrison – Beatles member and devotee of the practice.
Developed in India by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, it requires the silent repetition of a mantra and is practised for around 20 minutes twice a day.
Once he started practising, Thomas said the haunting image of his dead wife disappeared ‘within a nanosecond’.
‘It’s now not possible to access it,’ he said. ‘It completely changed everything. It was incredibly profound.’
He went on to say that although trauma had been ‘imposed’ on him, through meditation he found ‘the tools to not stay in pain’.
He added the blissfulness of meditation also allows him to experience ‘boundless creativity’ and said that he thought for a time about training as a transcendental meditation teacher.
And now Yasmin has become an integral part of this happier chapter in his life. In so many ways she is quite unlike Peaches, and not just in looks. Peaches, with her blonde hair, big blue eyes and ‘naughty’ streak, was the double of her tragic mother, and led a life of privilege in the public eye.
Yasmin, meanwhile, campaigns for changes in beauty standards, both in terms of weight and other issues such as body hair, and has spoken at length about her struggles with self-image, bulimia and PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), which left her hairier than other girls and falling short of society’s accepted terms of female beauty.
In an interview with an online magazine she said: ‘I struggled deeply with my body in my early teenage years – there was simply no role model I could identify myself with.
‘I had bulimia for years and started going to therapy at a young age, but I never understood back then that my emotional well-being is linked [to] how my body feels and I treated both very badly. I blamed my body for everything.’
She also described how an abusive ex would point out ‘what was wrong with my body and how different I should look’.
‘Being half Moroccan and having PCOS, I’m a little bit more hairy than others. From a young age, I would shave in secret, but now that I’m older, I’ve learnt to fully accept it and now have a deeper understanding of what it means to me, where it comes from – and I’m proud of it.
‘When I first grew my body hair, I felt liberated. I just don’t care what people think.’
She adds: ‘I don’t like thinking of myself as a size, so if I find something I like in a second-hand shop, I take it home and adjust it to make it fit.’
It was only when she started modelling that she started to ‘own herself’ again, she said.
‘Suddenly I saw images of me in magazines and realised I was always a role model to myself. I was the one person I was looking for and I’m actually now a role model to younger girls.’
She is. Last year she walked in a catwalk show in Milan, and Thomas proudly came along to support her. She posted images of them dancing together afterwards on her Instagram.
Although she doesn’t reference Thomas directly by name, she has spoken happily of her ‘partner’ and also of his dog, who she described as her ‘soulmate’.
That’s Parper, the labrador which Peaches loved, and with whom she appeared on Sport Relief shortly before her death.
Yasmin said: ‘I have a really deep connection to him and he’s helping me with so many struggles in life. I love him so much.’
It’s a hopeful end to a very sad story – and one in which two little boys, who sadly never really knew their mother, can find happiness, safe from the tragedy that has stalked their family for too long.
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