OPINION: It's got to be the worst luck in the world to be raised in a high-profile media family with an entertainer for a father.

Millie Elder-Holmes is one glaring example of why.

We know too much about her, and have done for far too long.

We saw her picture when she was little, we watched her grow up in the excitable media, and now we should leave her alone to get on with whatever she does when she's not at the tattoo parlour.

She did nothing to earn our attention but exist.

I blame Millie's step-father, the engaging, quixotic, sentimental Paul Holmes, for dragging her into the spotlight.

He loved attention and put her in his picture, but there was no need for it, and it doesn't seem to have done her a power of good.

We don't all long for life in front of a camera.

As far as I can tell Millie is a normal enough young woman of 26, neither a genius nor an idiot.

She could yet get an education, get a job, and have a contented life.

She's had drug issues, but thousands of well-off parents have had their hearts broken by a once-loving child, a Millie, who morphs into an angry stranger; they just don't air it publicly.

She had the good fortune of money behind her, so she never needed to hit the streets, and with her murdered boyfriend we're told she - they - climbed out of the misery of addiction to a better future. So she has grit. That's good.

Connor Morris, heavily inked son of a leading Head Hunter, had cannabis and alcohol in his system for his final street fight and appalling death, the trial looking into his killing revealed.

He died as she screamed and tried to stop his blood flow, in a scenario that rivals West Side Story.

But many New Zealanders seem to think cannabis use is no big deal, and alcohol abuse is so common we might as well call it normal

It's no big deal that Millie's boyfriend wouldn't have been a mother's dream of a son-in-law, either. What young man is?

Life as a Head Hunter's girlfriend, or something similar, is what countless young women in this country call glamour, either with gang-patched boys, or with un-patched boys who may just look respectable.

Girls grow up and change, though, if we let them, as do boys, but there is always a period in a young woman's life when she takes on risk, violence, drama, and calls it love.

Morris may be the love of Millie's life, but she has only been alive for 27 years. Hopefully she won't be trailing around with a partner watching his fights when she's 36, or 46.

By then she may have had enough of tragedy.

One thing might stand in the way of an innocuous life: Millie's tattoos.

She has a lot of them, so she will always be a shop window for the young woman she was before she was 30.

Most people probably look back to that operatic time in their life and barely recognise the person they were, but maybe a body covered in ink is really no weirder than the wedding portraits people hang on their walls long after they can remember what they were doing that day, or why they thought it was a good idea.

I'll say this for Millie: she's stylish.

With her long, dark hair and huge sunglasses, when she turned up at Morris's killer's trial she elevated the mundane violence of his death into a Greek tragedy.

That image will linger long after Morris's death is forgotten by those who never knew him, a reminder of how staunchly Millie played the starring role of her young life – and then moved on.

Moving on would be good.