Two years ago, beloved MasterChef judge chef Jock Zonfrillo passed away suddenly. For the first time since his passing, his wife Lauren Zonfrillo has opened up about his sudden death and what her life has been like without him.
Speaking to Liz Hayes for a 7 News Spotlight special Jock and Me: Love, Loss and Legacy, Zonfrillo spoke candidly about the moment she was told her husband had passed away. However, when pressed by Hayes about her husband’s cause of death, declared by the coroner, Zonfrillo said she would be keeping the information private.
During the interview, Zonfrillo revealed that she and her two children, whom she shares with her late husband, were in Rome at the time of his passing, while Zonfrillo himself remained in Australia to promote the new season of MasterChef.
After repeatedly trying to reach him by phone at his hotel room in Melbourne to no response, Zonfrillo said she became “hysterical” while contacting the hotel’s front desk for answers.
After some time, police were summoned to Zonfrillo’s room to conduct a welfare check, at which point Lauren was tragically informed that a “deceased male” was found in his hotel room. Zonfrillo says the clinical terms used to describe her husband were distressing.
Jock Zonfrillo was always open about his struggles as a former heroin addict with ongoing mental health problems. During the interview, Hayes broached the question that many fans of Jock had been wondering since his sudden passing.
“This is a hard question for me to ask, but do you think his demons had caught up with him?” the journalist asked.
Zonfrillo replied that she didn’t believe Jock took his own life.
“No, I allowed every option to come through my mind. That’s a rational way of thinking about it,” she said.
“I just knew where he was at. I think, more than anyone, I was very comfortable with putting that as an option. I put every option down, because I needed to strike them out. He wasn’t at that point at all where I worried about him.
“He had great perspective on life, we lived a great life, he was very much present with the kids and we were in this dream state of going, ‘we’re going to move to Rome, can you believe it?'”
However, as a seemingly healthy, 46-year-old man, Hayes acknowledged that Jock “shouldn’t have died”.
“I just wanted to know he wasn’t in pain and I asked that,” Zonfrillo told Hayes.
“I said, ‘did anything look like he might have been in pain?’. They said there was nothing strange. The sheets were on him, and everything was calm, so no.”
After Jock’s sudden death, the coroner did an inquest on his passing. Jock’s cause of death was deemed not to be in he public interest. Zonfrillo says she was glad the report was being kept private, and she intends to keep it that way.
“That’s what I wanted, and I was grateful for it,” she said.
“A lot of people want to know the answer to that, I’m really aware of that. I’ve had many experiences ofpeople coming up to me and asking me ‘how did Jock die?’. All strangers. It’s very unsettling.”
“Jock was very open, and he made those decisions on what he was willing to talk about. I now don’t want to make those decisions because I don’t know which ones he does and doesn’t want to talk about so we just decided, if it wasn’t in the public domain because Jock didn’t put it in the public domain, we wouldn’t contribute in any way.”
Although Zonfrillo acknowledged that she knows Jock’s cause of death, she doesnt feel that it necessarily helped her healing process.
“I wouldn’t say that it helped. There’s nothing unanswered and nothing that’s not understood. I have an answer, but it doesn’t make a difference because by the time I got the answer, it was so far down the track that it just wasn’t as necessary for me.”
Jock Zonfrillo was found dead in a Melbourne hotel room in May 2023. According to a spokesperson for Victoria’s Coronoers Court, the investigation into Jock’s death was finalised in August 2024 with the reports not to be published publicly.
Lauren Zonfrillo has written a book about her husband’s passing called Till Death Do Us Part, which was released this week. You can watch Zonfrillo’s full interview with 7 News Spotlight on 7Plus.
The post Jock Zonfrillo’s Wife Lauren Opens Up About His Death 2 Years On: ‘We Lived A Great Life’ appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
