"But when alcohol comes in, start running. Because there's a demon there, and it goes back to her childhood"
About this Quote
“But when alcohol comes in, start running” lands like a stage whisper that’s also an alarm bell: part advice, part damage-control memo. Coming from David Gest, a celebrity who lived in the slipstream of other famous lives, the line reads as a practiced survival tactic in public culture - the kind where personal chaos becomes both private crisis and tabloid commodity. “Start running” isn’t poetic; it’s procedural. It suggests experience, repetition, and a hard-earned map of someone else’s pattern.
Then he drops the word “demon,” and the quote snaps into a familiar celebrity script: addiction and volatility framed as possession. That metaphor does two things at once. It dramatizes the threat (good for a soundbite) while also shifting agency away from the person drinking. The “demon” becomes the villain, allowing Gest to sound compassionate even as he warns people to flee. Empathy and self-protection share the same sentence, uneasily.
“...and it goes back to her childhood” is the key tell. It’s not just scandal; it’s origin story. Gest gestures at trauma as explanation, offering a causal narrative that modern audiences recognize instantly - hurt becomes headline becomes behavior. The subtext is messy: he’s implying he knows intimate history, asserting proximity and authority, but he’s also packaging that history into a neat justification for why the room should clear when the bottle opens.
Intent-wise, it’s a boundary disguised as concern, and a bit of mythmaking disguised as diagnosis - the celebrity ecosystem’s favorite language for real pain.
Then he drops the word “demon,” and the quote snaps into a familiar celebrity script: addiction and volatility framed as possession. That metaphor does two things at once. It dramatizes the threat (good for a soundbite) while also shifting agency away from the person drinking. The “demon” becomes the villain, allowing Gest to sound compassionate even as he warns people to flee. Empathy and self-protection share the same sentence, uneasily.
“...and it goes back to her childhood” is the key tell. It’s not just scandal; it’s origin story. Gest gestures at trauma as explanation, offering a causal narrative that modern audiences recognize instantly - hurt becomes headline becomes behavior. The subtext is messy: he’s implying he knows intimate history, asserting proximity and authority, but he’s also packaging that history into a neat justification for why the room should clear when the bottle opens.
Intent-wise, it’s a boundary disguised as concern, and a bit of mythmaking disguised as diagnosis - the celebrity ecosystem’s favorite language for real pain.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mental Health |
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