Australian Olympian Lisa Curry has revealed she suspects her late daughter Jaimi Kenny was being abused prior to her untimely death at age 33. Jaimi, Curry's eldest child with ex-husband Grant Kenny, passed away in 2020 after a long battle with alcoholism and anorexia.
In an interview on Amelia Phillips' Healthy Her podcast, Curry said: "It looks like someone (had) bashed her." She explained that Jaimi would regularly send her photos, including images of herself covered in bruises. "We had this thing going where she would send me a photo of a little flower growing out of the concrete, or she'd send me a beautiful door, or her breakfast, or herself covered in bruises."
Photos raised suspicions
Curry said she has photos on her phone that made her question the injuries. "I've got photos on my phone where a couple of times I've looked at them and I'm thinking 'hang on a minute, what happened here?'" Jaimi would explain away the bruises as accidents from bumping into things, but Curry was not convinced and suspected she was being beaten. "I'm not quite a hundred per cent sure that that didn't happen, because of the photos on my phone."
Curry added: "I knew some of the really dodgy people that were around her, and now when I look at the photos I think, 'you don't get a black eye (from bumping into things)'."
Final days and grief
The images of bruises appeared in the lead-up to Jaimi's death. Curry described her daughter as "really, really unwell, and we couldn't save her." In a social media post marking the five-year anniversary of Jaimi's death last September, Curry wrote: "The grief started before she was gone. Not knowing when or if that awful day would ever come. It was all-consuming. The slow and inevitable breaking of our hearts as we watched our baby fade away. And even though she still kept smiling right to the end, we could see the sadness in her eyes."
Jaimi's family confirmed her death in September 2022, stating she had died after "a long-term illness and passed away peacefully in hospital." She had a run-in with the law in 2014 when she was pulled over for an elevated alcohol reading. Her troubles are believed to have worsened in 2017 after the death of her boyfriend, Lacky Crossley.
Lisa Curry and Grant Kenny were one of Australia's most famous couples in the years before Jaimi was born in June 1987. Their fame was so intense that they hired police to control crowds at their 1986 wedding. A year later, Jaimi was born and was already dubbed by media as Australia's next athletic star and a "water baby." By age 14, she was competing in national swimming competitions and expressed a desire to "compete for Australia one day."
