Lauren Zonfrillo turned to a cocktail of prescription drugs including cannabis oil to cope with her first birthday after the sudden death of her celebrity chef husband.
MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo was found dead in a Melbourne hotel room about 2am on May 1, 2023 after police were called to conduct a welfare check on the 46-year-old.
There was widespread speculation about the cause of Zonfrillo’s sudden death due to his well-publicised history of drug abuse and mental health struggles.He left behind Lauren and their two young children, five-year-old Alfie and three-year-old Isla, as well as daughters Ava and Sofia from previous marriages.
At the time of Zonfrillo’s death, Lauren had been in Italy and reportedly became concerned when her husband failed to keep to their usual daily schedule of telephone calls.
A senior Victoria Police source told Daily Mail Australia that officers who attended Zagame’s House in Carlton found Zonfrillo dead in his bed and saw no obvious signs of anything suspicious or unusual.There was no drug paraphernalia located, no one else in his room and police at the scene formed the initial view Zonfrillo had died of natural causes.
Lauren has never publicly discussed Zonfrillo’s cause of death and a spokeswoman for Victoria’s Coroners Court told Daily Mail Australia in February that the August 2024 findings of an investigation would not be published.
It is unclear if Lauren will reveal what she knows of what happened the night her husband died in her upcoming book Till Death Do Us Part, an extract of which appears in the current edition of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
In that extract, Lauren describes how she coped with her first birthday after Zonfrillo’s loss.
‘I started crying the night before and continued for hours in bed, so I took a sleeping tablet, and then when I woke up the next morning, the tears instantly started again,’ she writes.
‘The kids came into my room in the morning, and without even saying anything, Alfie went downstairs to the freezer, got me two icepacks, came back upstairs and told me to put them on my head.I said it was my birthday, and the response I got was to be asked when they would be able to eat some of my cake.’
Alfie and Isla then went downstairs and made themselves breakfast.
‘I felt like they didn’t care it was my birthday, and that made the crying even more uncontrollable,’ she writes. ‘Then I acknowledged they didn’t understand the importance of the day to me, and I was expecting a three-year-old and a six-year-old to be Jock.’
As Lauren’s family and friends called and texted with birthday messages she turned off her phone ‘so I could cry and feel sorry for myself interrupted’.
‘I was now maybe an hour and a half away from needing to leave for my birthday lunch with friends, so I climbed out of bed, took a couple of beta-blockers and some CBD oil, had a shower and got in an Uber,’ she writes.
Lauren burst into tears when she met friends including her late husband’s fellow MasterChef judge Andy Allen and his wife Alex for lunch.CBD (cannabidiol) oil is a prescription medication made from the hemp plant and used to treat epilepsy. It is taken by some users to relieve anxiety and pain.
Beta-blockers are used to lower blood pressure and heart rate but can also ease anxiety.
Lauren had assumed the first year after Zonfrillo’s death would be the hardest, particularly because of all the ‘firsts’ she and the family would experience without him, but that was not the case.
‘That may be true for the first Christmas or Mother’s Day, but they actually come in waves each year, and some are freak waves I didn’t see coming,’ she writes.
Lauren also describes how she handles raising two young children as a single parent.
‘An agreement I made with myself early on was that good enough was good enough,’ she writes. Some of those moments included ordering a cake from Uber Eats for her son’s birthday, an occasion which was previously catered for by her husband.
The marketing and communications agency founder, who appears as a panellist on the ABC’s Gruen program, also could not work out how to turn on the Christmas tree lights.
‘I just keep telling myself that I am doing the best I can in this moment in time,’ she writes.
‘As I move further away from the immediate trauma of losing Jock, the importance of numbers is receding as I shift from basic survival and getting through one day at a time to freedom and release from guilt.
Before his death, Zonfrillo had been preparing for the launch of MasterChef’s 15th season, which was set to premiere the night his body was found.
He was also in the early stages of planning a new restaurant and had started working on a cookbook prior to his death.
Zonfrillo and his wife had put their four-bedroom Carlton terrace up for rent ahead of a potential permanent move to Italy, where his father was born.
Daily Mail Australia previously revealed Zonfrillo had been diagnosed with bowel cancer in mid 2021, after recovering from an earlier bout with the disease.
It is not suggested the cancer killed Zonfrillo, only that he had told friends its return was detected after a routine colonoscopy.
A source said Zonfrillo kept his health problems from most friends and colleagues, receiving treatment including chemotherapy when MasterChef was not filming.
A fortnight after Zonfrillo’s death his wife led about 200 mourners who gathered for a funeral at Macquarie Park Cemetery and Crematorium at North Ryde on May 13.Among those who attended the service were celebrity chefs George Calombaris, Matt Moran, Colin Fassnidge, Manu Feildel and Shannon Bennett as well as Zonfrillo’s co-stars Allen and Melissa Leong.
Lauren was among the pallbearers and delivered a eulogy before Zonfrillo’s friend and fellow Scotsman, Jimmy Barnes, sang Amazing Grace with his daughter Mahalia.
Zonfrillo wrote in his 2021 memoir Last Shot about battling a heroin addiction from his teenage years working as a chef in Glasgow.
After moving to north-west England he sold cocaine and other drugs to supplement his wages, was eventually sacked and at 17 made his way to London.
Zonfrillo wrote that he turned up at Marco Pierre White’s renowned restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel in 1994 and the famed chef became a mentor who would shape his life.
He moved to Australia aged 20 in 1996 and got a job at Forty One restaurant in Sydney where he was using cocaine, pills, LSD and cannabis.According to his book, Zonfrillo kept a raging heroin habit hidden from everyone before going back to the UK in 1997 when his visa ran out.
He wrote of taking his last hit of heroin in the toilets at Heathrow airport before returning to Australia in early 2000.
Zonfrillo opened his own restaurants, Orana and Bistro Blackwood, in Adelaide in 2013. He added a third, Nonna Mallozzi, in 2018.
The latter lasted six months, Bistro Blackwood closed in late 2019 and Orana in March 2020.
Zonfrillo joined the MasterChef Australia judging panel in 2020 with food critic Leong and restaurateur Allen after original judges Calombaris, Gary Mehigan and Matt Preston left.
Daily Mail Australia’s Inside Mail revealed this week Liz Hayes would interview Lauren in her first assignment for Seven’s Spotlight program after leaving Nine’s 60 Minutes.
Till Death Do Us Part, published by Penguin Books Australia, will be released on May 6.