A new book has detailed the late Chester Bennington’s addiction “battle”.
The Linkin Park frontman’s final months are laid out in It Starts With One: The Legend and Legacy of Linkin Park, written by Jason Lipshutz.
Chester was 41 when he died by suicide in 2017. His widow, Talinda Benning, revealed that having struggled with substance abuse problems throughout his adult life, Chester “had been sober for almost six months” in the lead-up to his death.
However, the book claimed, Chester had also privately revealed to others close to him that he’d been fighting the urge to drink again.
“He was describing an hour-by-hour battle with addiction,” musician Ryan Shuck, 51, told Rolling Stone at the time. Ryan, the guitarist and backing vocalist of Chester’s side project Dead by Sunrise, said he had been communicating via text with Chester about his alcoholism “in the weeks leading up to his death”, per the book.
A toxicology report later confirmed Chester had trace amounts of alcohol in his system when he died.
“I knew instantly that that drink triggered that shame,” Talinda, now 48, said, adding the relapse would have “triggered a lifetime of unhealthy neural pathways.”
In an extract from the book, obtained by People, its author concluded it would be near-impossible to determine exactly what drove Chester to take his own life: “There are no easy answers, and there never will be.”
