Film Clips: Of Heath Ledger and the Autopsy Report

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Jeff Wells has stirred up a sh*tstorm of controversy over on Hollywood Elsewhere with a post about the Heath Ledger autopsy report. In a post bluntly titled, "Heath did it to himself," Wells says, in part:

New York's medical examiner report was predictably dry and succinct and non-judgmental, but the implication is that Heath Ledger didn't care to calculate or remember which prescription drugs he'd taken, much less assess their combined effect upon his body. You can say "accident" over and over but the blunt answer is that Heath did it to himself. Like I wrote the day he died. A tree didn't fall on him. Actions have consequences.


The post has generated the predictable array of comments, from the sympathetic to the angry to the truly asinine. Which all goes to show, if nothing else, the impact the death of a celebrity can have on people who never even knew him. Of course, with the release of the autopsy report today, no matter which way it came down, people were going to make judgments and jump to conclusions they shouldn't be jumping to. It's easy to judge Ledger, even if his death by overdose was accidental, because he should have known better, right? It's easy to look at what we (think we) know of his life and say, hell, the guy had everything going for him, what the f*ck? That's what most everyone was saying around Park City on the afternoon of January 22, as we all got out of press screenings to the news of his death. Shock. Profound sadness. Disbelief. Vehement indignation and anger, even.

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