Daisy Coleman, who appeared in Netflix’s documentary Audrie & Daisy, died at the age of 23 last week. Her death by suicide came several years after the Netflix movie spotlighted the sexual assault she had reported as a teenager. Along with Daisy’s story, Audrie & Daisy also told the story of Audrie Pott, who also died by suicide a little over a week after she was reportedly sexually assaulted in 2012. Now Pott’s mother has spoken up about meeting Daisy and the impact she had on people.
Sheila Pott, Audrie Pott’s mother, recently spoke out about meeting Daisy Coleman as Audrie & Daisy was coming together, as well as speaking out about why the news is shocking and sad. She says she first met Daisy Coleman at Sundance in 2016, telling The Independent the young woman had “guts.”
The first time I met [the Coleman family] was actually at Sundance, and it was pretty emotional. For me, it was lovely to meet [Daisy] because she had the guts to get up, tell her story, survive, and take back the power.
Audrie & Daisy premiered on Netflix back in 2016, just a few short years after Audrie Pott and Daisy Coleman reportedly had been victims of sexual assault as young teenagers. Both had dealt with cyberbullying, but Daisy Coleman had seemed to be working through the trauma she had suffered, first due to the harrowing incident and then through the public response after her alleged abuser was arrested. Charges were eventually dropped against Matthew Barnett.
Daisy Coleman later helped to found SafeBAE, an organization geared toward helping to end sexual assault in middle school and high school communities. Due to her advocacy and willingness to speak about her story, Sheila Pott always felt like Daisy Coleman was a fighter, calling the news “incredibly shocking” and noting she always seemed to be working through her mental struggles related to what happened.
I always refer to her as a warrior. She was a young, young person to have gone through so much. You know the scars of rape and bullying run really deep. And she would smile even though we knew there was a lot of pain that was beneath the surface. So you can imagine there were so many people that were rooting for her and rallying behind her. That’s why this news is so incredibly shocking and sad.
Daisy Coleman’s mother spoke out about the pain her daughter experienced daily, noting she wished she could have taken that pain away after news of Daisy’s death went public. The news was revealed after a wellness check had been undergone at Coleman’s abode in Colorado shortly before she had committed suicide. Lakewood police who did the wellness check spoke with Coleman for over an hour and cleared her medically. Just a few scant hours later she died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
At the time of her death, Daisy Coleman had been working on a follow-up film to Audrie & Daisy that would follow her journey after she moved from California to Colorado, pursued work as a tattoo artist and worked to recover from her PTSD thanks to EMDR therapy. The documentary was expected to be called Saving Daisy and it was in production at the time of the Netflix star’s death.
Clearly, Daisy Coleman touched a lot of lives before her death and was an artist and an advocate in her own right who always sought the light. Yet, sometimes there are deeper feelings permeating that light. In Audrie & Daisy, she talked about sometimes being in a dark corner and feeling that “doing away with herself” felt like the only way out. While she knew that wasn’t “the truth at all” sometimes those thoughts still permeated and eventually it seems they won out. But according to Sheila Pott and others, she's left behind and will be remembered for the bright "light" she shone on any room she entered.
