Jeff Brazier has said he’ll ‘never stop trying’ to save his son Freddy from addiction, revealing the toll its taken on their family.
The presenter and former partner of the late Jade Goody has revealed how he tried going to the police after a difficult few years for Freddy, 22, who has been addicted to cannabis.
Freddy, who appeared on Celebrity Race Across The World with his father, has also revealed his psychosis diagnosis after spending his 18th birthday in a psychiatric ward.
Speaking on Matt Willis’s podcast On The Mend, Jeff, 47, said he ‘couldn’t do anything’ to stop his son’s issues.
‘To see your son suffer in that way and not be able to appeal to his better nature to stop that addiction cycle….I couldn’t do anything to stop it. And I tried standing in front of the front door, I tried going to the police,’ he told the musician.
Jeff said during Freddy’s recent psychotic episodes, he would search for him on the streets to try and bring him home.
He added that, despite Freddy going to rehab and being sectioned, it ‘wasn’t enough for that behaviour to change’.
‘What else can I do but keep trying? I just keep trying. I’m never going to stop. I just always want to support him. It’s what Jade would be absolutely insisting that I do,’ he said.
In quotes obtained by The Mirror, Jeff also opens up on his turbulent relationship with Jade’s mother, Jackiey Budden, who Freddy has lived with.
‘It’s really difficult to protect your child from someone that they’re related to, especially if they’re the last surviving blood relative of the person that you’ve lost that you love the most,’ he explained.
It comes after Freddy revealed how he spent some of the budget he and his dad received while filming Celebrity Race Across the World on drugs.
The pair appeared together on series two of the hit BBC show, which was released in August 2024 and involved them travelling over 7,800 miles from Belém, in Brazil to Frutillar, Chile, with a strict budget of £1,100 per person.
But he admitted that he ‘wasn’t in the place mentally’ to take part, especially as it involved being filmed on Mother’s Day as he grieved for his late mum.
The late Big Brother star died from cervical cancer in 2009 at the age of 27.
‘It come at a f**king bad time, to be honest. Like the week before the master interviews, I’d had quite an extreme episode and I’d calmed down by the time of the interviews,’ Freddy shared on The Terry Stone Connection podcast.
He continued: ‘I weren’t [sic.] in the place mentally, and when I knew that we were going to be filming over Mother’s Day as well, I was like, “Oh f*ck sh*t, I’m going to have cameras in my face on f**king Mother’s Day. I want to be alone.”’
Freddy added that he climbed out of a hotel window before subsequently buying cannabis to smoke on the beach.
‘I was like, “I’m okay, I’m okay”, and I’ve gone to the beach and we’d seen these people before, they were couples and they make bracelets with countries on. And they bought me a beer and I’ve taken some money out of the budget we were given, and I’ve went [sic.] and bought myself a three five [of weed] in Brazil on Mother’s Day.
‘And smoked it with these two bracelet makers on the beach while looking at the stars.’
Freddy described the experience as ‘beautiful’, but also said that it was ‘so wrong’.