Late Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland’s widow Jamie Weiland was interviewed on the Joe Howard podcast last night. Joe Howard is close friends with Wildabouts bassist Tommy Black, and claimed last December that Scott Weiland told him he missed his kids just weeks before his death. Weiland died due to an overdose of cocaine, ethanol, and methylenedioxyamphetamine on December 3, 2015 on his tour bus in Bloomington, Minnesota. Tommy Black was arrested for suspected cocaine possession but charges were later dropped.
In this interview with Howard, Jamie opened up for the first time in-depth about her husband’s death, and Alternative Nation transcribed several quotes.
“It was nothing short of brutal for quite awhile there. I could really only describe it as like a surreal nightmare I could not wake up from. I spent a couple months there very worried that I would honestly never recover, that this happening in my life was literally going to break me, and I would never come back. It’s funny, I’ve had so many experiences since he’s passed, just meeting people, opportunities that have come up, just new meaningful insights in my life that I feel come from him, and I call them his secret gifts that he’s sending me from the other side.”
“I know that he would want me to be strong, that he would want me to be happy, that he would want me to be creating and working as an artist, and doing all of the things I love to do. It was incredibly difficult to do any of them for a long time because I was literally just completely paralyzed with grief, but time does heal, and you start remembering the good things, and the things that make you smile, instead of the things that make you cry.”
She later said that Scott was in a good place when he died. “It’s sad, the timing of it really, is so incredibly tragic, because he was on the verge of so many great things. He had finally gotten to a place where he was trying to be, relatively healthy. He just wanted to create, we were very much in love. Of course there were always issues with Scott, that’s not a secret, and I’m not going to pretend that those things didn’t exist, but for the most part he really was making great strides. It’s sad that he had to depart before he really got to reap the benefits of everything he was working so hard for, and really deserved after all of the horrible things he had been through, all of the trauma. It’s completely unjust, and always will be, but I know that when he passed away he was happy, and it was peaceful. He sent me that one last text message: ‘I’m so in love with my beautiful wife.’ And that was it.”
She also discussed the legal issues with Scott’s estate, “The truth with Scott’s estate, and the finances and how everything was when he was alive, how everything was left after his passing, is such a complicated mess. There’s no way for the general population to understand or grasp how this could unfold the way that it has. I think that there’s this preconceived notion that Scott being a rock star must have just had millions in the bank, and that I’m probably just sitting pretty and collecting money, it’s the antithesis of the truth. He unfortunately passed away with an enormous amount of debt, there were a lot of loose ends that were never dealt with.”
After revealing that her grief due to Scott’s death lead to her initially staying out of legal issues, she later added, “As far as the claim that I made, it was very perfunctory. We had a prenuptial agreement, he was supposed to pay a certain amount of money, he only paid it twice. It’s just a formality. To be honest, I’ll probably never see that money. Anyone that understands how prenuptial agreements actually work, and how his estate was left, get that. but to the general public, I think it looks like, ‘Oh Jamie is just trying to money grub.’ (Laughs) That’s not what’s happening.”
Jamie also responded to Mary Weiland’s open letter to Rolling Stone.
“When she released that thing with Rolling Stone, he had not yet even been cremated.”
She added, “The other thing too is, how do I put this eloquently, what she wrote to Rolling Stone was absurd and entirely not based in reality. The truth behind Scott’s lack of relationship with his children is a story that is not out there, and I’m not going to tell that story because I don’t want my stepchildren to be hurt or to be put in the public eye. It’s nobody’s business really, but I don’t think it takes much imagination for anyone with half a brain, considering the history with Scott and Mary, to come up with a hypothesis as to why his relationship with his kids was poisoned.”
Mary Weiland released an open letter last December criticizing her late ex-husband for being absent from their children’s lives over the last few years.
Mary said, “I spent countless hours trying to calm his paranoid fits, pushing him into the shower and filling him with coffee, just so that I could drop him into the audience at Noah’s talent show, or Lucy’s musical. Those short encounters were my attempts at giving the kids a feeling of normalcy with their dad. But anything longer would often turn into something scary and uncomfortable for them.”
She later added, “When Scott did move on to another relationship, I hoped it would inspire him to grow. I had often encouraged him to date a ‘normal’ girl, a woman who was also a mother, someone who had the energy that I no longer had to love him. Instead, when he remarried, the children were replaced. They were not invited to his wedding; child support checks often never arrived. Our once sweet Catholic boy refused to watch the kids participate in Christmas Eve plays because he was now an atheist. They have never set foot into his house, and they can’t remember the last time they saw him on a Father’s Day.”
