The Friend Who Never Saw It Coming: Inside Lauren Bennett's Secret Struggle

When photographer James Hickey first learned that his longtime friend Lauren Bennett had died at 36, the news hit him in a way he wasn’t prepared for. The two hadn’t been close for years — their last professional collaboration was a decade ago — but the bond they’d forged in Los Angeles carried weight that distance and time couldn’t diminish. Hickey’s grief wasn’t just about loss. It was tangled up with something harder to articulate: the shock of realizing how little he’d known about what was happening in her life in those final months.

Bennett’s death was announced Monday, July 6 by her former G.R.L. bandmates, who released a statement saying their hearts were broken and that her spirit had touched countless lives. A cause of death hasn’t been officially revealed, though Kent&Medway Coroners in the U.K. confirmed an inquest was opened. Police are reportedly investigating whether she died by suicide — a possibility that hit Hickey particularly hard.

The story of their friendship reads like a snapshot of early 2000s creative ambition. They met in 2008 when Bennett called Hickey after seeing his CraigsList ad offering photography lessons. She was direct and unpretentious, telling him she was in a girl band and would be back from tour in six weeks. He was skeptical. She proved him wrong. Over the years, they became creative collaborators and confidants. Bennett connected him with industry contacts like Interscope Records and LMFAO. He was there for her through breakups and personal crises. When his sister died, she showed up as the kind of friend who knows how to simply be present without performing support.

But they drifted. By 2015, the photography work stopped. Check-ins became infrequent. Life happened — careers evolved, circles shifted, the momentum that once fueled their partnership faded into the background noise of adulthood. Hickey acknowledged losing touch with Bennett the way people lose touch with many friends from earlier chapters of their lives: gradually, without fanfare, without knowing it might be one of the last times you’ll have the chance to say something that matters.

What’s most striking about Hickey’s recollection isn’t just nostalgia. It’s his insistence on who Bennett was beneath the industry credentials. She was humble. Serious about her craft. Someone who carried protective shields but didn’t use them to dismiss hard truths. When Simone Battle, her G.R.L. bandmate, died by suicide in 2014, Bennett took it hard — the kind of hard that doesn’t fully heal. Hickey saw that. He watched her process it. But a decade later, when his own life nearly derailed — a coma, COVID, recovery — they reconnected briefly. He learned she and Kenny Wormald, the Footloose reboot actor she’d been with on and off, had gotten back together. She seemed happy about that. She seemed, from his vantage point, okay.

Bennett’s father, Richard Bennett, shared on Instagram that his daughter had experienced a severe allergic reaction to prescribed medication months before her death. He wrote that the family rallied around her and expressed deep disappointment that medical professionals and NHS services failed to treat her appropriately during her time of greatest need. He stated there were no suspicions regarding the circumstances of her death — a careful parsing of language that leaves room for interpretation.

What Hickey’s account reveals is the distance between knowing someone and understanding them. He remembered Bennett as creative, capable, and incapable of substance abuse issues. But he also admitted his biggest fear when the suicide reports surfaced: that the girl he’d known might have been suffering in ways he couldn’t see from the outside. That’s the trap of friendship interrupted by time. You remember the version of someone you knew. You don’t get to see how they change. You don’t get to offer help you might have given if the distance hadn’t grown.

She leaves behind a 6-year-old daughter, Harlow, with Wormald. She leaves behind a catalog of memories for people who knew her in fragments — bandmates, collaborators, friends from different eras of her life. And she leaves behind the kind of absence that makes people like James Hickey sit with the regret of letting distance become a permanent condition when it might have only been temporary.