Two weeks after her ex-husband’s tragic passing, Ricki Lake is coming clean about Christian Evans’ demons, and his cause of death.
The horrific truth about why he died, sadly, is what a lot of fans assumed when they first heard reports that Christian Evans was dead.
In a new interview, the former talk show host said that her ex, who suffered from bipolar disorder, committed suicide by gunshot in February.
“I’m in disbelief,” she tells People in its latest issue. “I have some bouts of peace, but it’s hard to swallow that this was supposed to happen.”
Days after sending his sister a suicide note, Christian Evans was discovered dead in his automobile with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
He was just 45 years old.
“I knew right then that he was gone. Everybody thought he was missing, but I knew,” Lake, 48, said of hearing about the letter’s existence.
“The struggle was just too much for him,” she added of her husband of three years (2012-2015). “[Christian] did the best he could.”
Evans previously threatened to end his life in a shocking suicide letter to a friend last fall (October 18), though he didn’t follow through.
“I had to sell most of my belongings to pay for a treatment center for bipolar and suicidal depression,” the late jewelry designer wrote.
“I’m in awful financial shape,” he wrote.
“Homeless in a custom Range Rover.”
Lake admits her former spouse’s sudden manic episodes led to their nasty 2014 breakup, saying “it was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
To say Evans’ mood swings were extreme would be an understatement, according to his ex-wife, who paints a sad and scary picture:
“He thought he could fly. He thought he could cute cancer with his hands. It was horrific. He just wasn’t the person I had been with for four years.”
“He was giving my money away,” she says.
“He thought he was a God.”
Lake also confirmed previous reports that she and Evans reconciled after she filed divorce papers, though ultimately it didn’t work out.
“He wasn’t stable … But I was still in love with him, so there was something romantic about it,” she explains. “I wanted to save him.”
She says she last saw him just three days before he took his own life, and in his last text to her, he wrote, “Good night, I love you angel.”
In her interview, Lake said that she plans to scatter his ashes on their favorite beach in Spain, where they couple got engaged in Ibiza in 2011.
R.I.P.
