The suicide texting case involving Michelle Carter, 17, and Conrad Roy, 18, shook the country, leaving everyone dismayed and saddened by Carter’s audacity, contributing to Roy’s death.
Other than the shock, the case depicted in shows such as Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville, I Love You, Now Die, and If Words Could Kill also spotlighted the role of mental illness in the many horrific crimes witnessed these days.
Michelle Carter’s defense argued that a change in anti-depressant medicine and an eating disorder drove her to convince her boyfriend to kill himself.
But did Michelle Carter have an eating disorder? If so, what role did the illness play in her aiding Conrad’s suicide?
Let’s find out!
Michelle Seemed To Seek Comfort From Food
In The Girl From Plainville, we are first introduced to Michelle Carter’s (Elle Fanning) problematic relationship with food when she runs up to her bedroom, grabs, and furiously chows down a packet of chocolate.
Throughout the series, the young teen regularly snacks on chips and candy. Whether she is texting her friends, talking to her boyfriend on the phone, or scrolling through social media, there is always a comforting bag of snacks by her side.
At first, this seems like normal teenage behavior until she starts hiding those empty snack bags, not wanting anyone to know about the food she’s binging on.
In one episode, Carter stuffs her face with food, eating until she becomes sick, and eventually vomiting inside a trash can in her bedroom. From then on, it was clear that Michelle had an eating disorder.
Did Michelle Carter have an eating disorder in real life? In the TV shows, Carter is depicted as having an unhealthy relationship with food, but was this the case in real life?
She Texted Friends About Her Anxiety and Problems With Food
In real life, Michelle Carter did not have many close friends; in fact, the teenager struggled to make friends and clung on desperately to the few schoolmates who were friendly to her.
One such friend was Samantha Boardman, who testified in court during Carter’s trial. Boardman and Carter met in their junior year of high school and started talking in math class but rarely hung out outside of school.
The two girls mostly connected over Carter’s issues with an eating disorder, with Samantha lending a listening ear and a supportive shoulder for Michelle to cry on.
In court, Samantha said, “I watched out for her and what she was eating.”
In one of a series of text messages that Carter would bombard Boardman with, she wrote, ” I am having a mental breakdown. I was okay until I had pasta for dinner, and I totally lost it.”
“It created so much anxiety I did not know what to do,” she added, implying that she had harmed herself using a knife, an act that seemed they she regularly performed.
From the real-life text messages between Boardman and Michelle and based on the depictions in the television shows, it is safe to say that Michelle did have an eating disorder.
