Kate Spade suffered years of mental illness, sister says. Suicide 'not unexpected'

Grieving deeply, Kate Spade's older sister told The Star on Tuesday that her famous designer sister suffered debilitating mental illness for the last three or four years and was self-medicating with alcohol. 

Spade's apparent suicide on Tuesday, at age 55 inside the bedroom of her New York Park Avenue apartment "was not unexpected by me," Reta Saffo, Spade's older sister by two years, told The Star by email from her house in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Family members struggled mightily to help Spade but to little avail, she said. "Sometimes you simply cannot SAVE people from themselves!" she wrote. Spade seemed concerned how hospitalization might harm the image of the "happy-go-lucky" Kate Spade brand, she said. 

She saw how her sister seemed fixated on Robin Williams on the day, in August 2014, that he committed suicide by hanging.

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