This account is not even close to exhaustive. In between there have been burglaries, BBC documentaries, kidnap plots, toy boys, facelifts, fiancés, OnlyFans, boob jobs, a YouTube channel and the relentless challenge of caring for Harvey’s complex medical needs. Born partially blind, with a rare condition called Prader-Willi syndrome, her eldest son will always need intensive specialist care and violent outbursts are a fact of daily life. Price is undergoing tests for ADHD and is still recovering from an accident while on holiday in Turkey two years ago when she fell off a wall and broke both of her feet. Her beloved mother, Amy, 70, is terminally ill. The Instagram accounts of Price and her various exes function as a running commentary on the relentless drama, while the gossip sites run stories about her practically every day.
How any one person could withstand all of this is mind-boggling. I wanted to sit down with her to try and make some sense of it. To say that Price does not love the press would be quite the understatement, so I was surprised when my request for an interview received an enthusiastic yes. It is a less welcome surprise to discover she expects it to take place in the midst of the commotion in her kitchen, surrounded by nine other people and a dog.
Price with her children in 2020, from left, Junior, Harvey, Jett, Princess and Bunny
W8MEDIA
“Well, I’ve only got this room,” she says, explaining that she has just finished filming a new series of
Katie Price’s Mucky Mansion for Channel 4, chronicling her attempts to restore the West Sussex property following a catalogue of break-ins, vandalism and disrepair, so is contractually forbidden to grant any other media access to the rest of the 19-room farmhouse. “But don’t mind this lot,” she offers cheerfully. “They’ve heard it all before.”
And there’s the problem. At ease among her audience, Price happily riffs along familiar lines — “I’ve put in all white carpets upstairs, I know, I must be mad,” and so on — retreading old anecdotes and jokes until I have to put my foot down. Looking faintly puzzled but eager to be agreeable, in the end she reluctantly packs four of them off to a nearby garden centre, waving them out the door with, “Sorry, guys, it’s not me saying you have to go.”
The minute they’ve gone I feel guilty. It is very plain that bustle soothes Price and makes her feel secure; the busier and noisier the house, the happier she is. “Even when I was young,” she agrees, “it was always the same, always horses and animals, my family was so sociable and outgoing, and it still is like that. You know, anyone could just turn up, ‘Cup of tea, yeah? Come in!’ It’s always packed. We’re people people.”
There is nothing dead-eyed about Price this time. In an old pair of tracksuit bottoms and one of Harvey’s T-shirts, artifice-free and insistently charismatic, she talks at full pelt and gives the impression of someone trying hard to connect. Her default setting is more broadcast than receive, so she doesn’t tend to listen very carefully, but openness is clearly central to her self-image and she wants me to know she is the opposite of controlling.
“I’ve got nothing to hide. My
Mucky Mansion, they’ve been filming here since July, they film wherever they want to and I’m happy, cos I am who I am, welcome to my home, I love filming, I love sharing, I just love it. The camera crew say to me I’m one of the only people they’ve ever met who’s exactly the same on camera as off.”
SPLASH NEWS
The other pillar of her self-image is betrayal. Believing herself wronged by practically every person she has ever met — animated by outrage, simultaneously resigned — Price appears to exist in a perma-froth of indignation.
With the possible exception of Woods — about whom Price seems undecided — she says every single man she’s ever dated has cheated on her (Andre has always denied that he did). “Kieran even had an affair with the woman I bought the guinea pigs from.” When they’re not sleeping with her husbands, people are “always trying to make money out of me”.
Apart from her family and a handful of old friends, does literally everyone she knows sell a story about her? Without hesitation: “Yes.” She no longer employs cleaners because they “always” do. “I just don’t trust anyone.”
Giving a guided tour of its interior on YouTube
Criticism of her as a mother cuts her to the quick. She knows people accuse her of overexposing her children on social media, of lacking domestic boundaries — and she is having none of it. “I’ve got five kids, I’ve got animals, I’ve got a house to run, I’m the breadwinner and I just do it by myself. I wouldn’t have it any other way. You don’t have kids to pass them off to nannies, you don’t have kids to put them in boarding school. If you’re going to have kids, then you involve them in your life.”
MENU
sunday december 18 2022
The Sunday Times Magazine
INTERVIEW
Katie Price: ‘I don’t need men’s validation any more’
The former page 3 model and reality star speaks to Decca Aitkenhead about therapy, family and longing for a drama-free life
Katie Price, 44, as she is today
SOPHIA SPRING FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
Decca Aitkenhead
Sunday December 18 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
Five of Katie Price’s dogs have been locked in the stables before I arrive at her farmhouse. “Because otherwise,” she assures me, “it would be
chaos!”
The non-chaotic scene in her kitchen therefore looks like this: Price, 44, is perched on a high stool in rollers; her make-up artist is working on her face; her nine-year-old son, Jett, is on a sofa; her severely autistic 20-year-old son, Harvey, is on his iPad; her 32-year-old half-sister, Sophie, is at the table. Then we have the photographer, two photographic assistants, Price’s old friend Ross and her hairdresser, who goes by the stage name of Mikey Kardashian and is fondly recalling the occasion of Jett’s birth, when he fitted hair extensions to Price as she lay on her hospital bed, catheter still in situ, recovering from an emergency caesarean. “We’ve done some weird old jobs together, haven’t we?” There are painters and decorators in the room next door, radio blaring — and there is Blade, a big black dog Price has to grab hold of each time the front door opens to another new arrival.
“Don’t let it bang!” is the perpetual refrain. “Harvey smashed my front window yesterday cos someone slammed it,” she explains. “That’s what triggers him … Blade! Come here! Is anyone cold? I’m always cold. I’ve got the radiators on full but it’s crazy, the oil heating bill’s three grand every four or five weeks. Blade, here! Would anyone like a cup of tea? Don’t look at the mess. Five kids, six dogs, six horses and no help. Whenever things calm down there’s another thing. And a-
nother thing.”
“And-a-
nother thing,” Jett sings along softly from the sofa.
In the 12 years since I last interviewed Price, it has indeed been one thing after another. Even back then her life already seemed unfathomably eventful. Propelled to fame by page 3 at just 17, the glamour model formerly known as Jordan had built a celebrity empire on her implausibly pneumatic figure and remorselessly public private life. A premiership footballer, Dwight Yorke, had abandoned her while pregnant, leaving her to raise their profoundly disabled son, Harvey, alone. Reality TV cameras had followed every moment of her first marriage to the pop star Peter Andre, whom she met in the Australian jungle in 2004 on
I’m a Celebrity. Their 2009 divorce was as ugly as their OK! wedding had been candy pink, and the pair have been feuding over their two children, Junior, 17, and Princess, 15, ever since. In 2010 she had just married Alex Reid, a cross-dressing cage fighter, and was reported to be worth £30 million, having monetised every twist and turn of the drama through reality TV shows, product lines, photoshoots, autobiographies, children’s books, even novels, none of which she wrote but one of which famously outsold an entire Booker prize shortlist.
ADVERTISEMENT
I remember a disconcertingly dead-eyed quality in Price when we met. Her internal life appeared indivisible from the bottom line, as if all human emotion had been transplanted by commercial calculation. The closest this country may ever come to its own Kim Kardashian, with her fortune secured Price struck me then as bulletproof. I could not have been more wrong.
As a teenager in Brighton, 1995
REX
The following year she split from Reid, and in 2013 married a part-time stripper and decorator, Kieran Hayler, five weeks after meeting him and already pregnant with Jett. A daughter, Bunny, followed in 2014, but by then Price had discovered Hayler’s affair with one of her oldest friends. Another affair with another of her closest friends soon emerged and the marriage ended in 2017 when she discovered he had also been sleeping with their nanny.
In 2018 she was carjacked at gunpoint in South Africa and raped — she was there filming a reality show for ITV with her family — after which she suffered a mental breakdown, attempted suicide and was treated at the Priory for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In 2019 she was declared bankrupt owing £3.2 million, convicted of driving while disqualified and issued with a restraining order against Hayler’s new partner following ugly scenes in a school playground. The following year she admitted to self-medicating with cocaine, returned to the Priory and began a relationship with a former
Love Island contestant, Carl Woods.
Price was readmitted to the Priory again last year after flipping her BMW while on cocaine and over the limit, and received a suspended prison sentence. She narrowly avoided jail again twice this year, once for breaching the terms of her insolvency and again for breaching the restraining order, for which she received 170 hours of community service. One week before our meeting Woods announced on Instagram that their relationship was over and accused her of cheating on him.
SPONSORED
This account is not even close to exhaustive. In between there have been burglaries, BBC documentaries, kidnap plots, toy boys, facelifts, fiancés, OnlyFans, boob jobs, a YouTube channel and the relentless challenge of caring for Harvey’s complex medical needs. Born partially blind, with a rare condition called Prader-Willi syndrome, her eldest son will always need intensive specialist care and violent outbursts are a fact of daily life. Price is undergoing tests for ADHD and is still recovering from an accident while on holiday in Turkey two years ago when she fell off a wall and broke both of her feet. Her beloved mother, Amy, 70, is terminally ill. The Instagram accounts of Price and her various exes function as a running commentary on the relentless drama, while the gossip sites run stories about her practically every day.
How any one person could withstand all of this is mind-boggling. I wanted to sit down with her to try and make some sense of it. To say that Price does not love the press would be quite the understatement, so I was surprised when my request for an interview received an enthusiastic yes. It is a less welcome surprise to discover she expects it to take place in the midst of the commotion in her kitchen, surrounded by nine other people and a dog.
Price with her children in 2020, from left, Junior, Harvey, Jett, Princess and Bunny
W8MEDIA
“Well, I’ve only got this room,” she says, explaining that she has just finished filming a new series of
Katie Price’s Mucky Mansion for Channel 4, chronicling her attempts to restore the West Sussex property following a catalogue of break-ins, vandalism and disrepair, so is contractually forbidden to grant any other media access to the rest of the 19-room farmhouse. “But don’t mind this lot,” she offers cheerfully. “They’ve heard it all before.”
And there’s the problem. At ease among her audience, Price happily riffs along familiar lines — “I’ve put in all white carpets upstairs, I know, I must be mad,” and so on — retreading old anecdotes and jokes until I have to put my foot down. Looking faintly puzzled but eager to be agreeable, in the end she reluctantly packs four of them off to a nearby garden centre, waving them out the door with, “Sorry, guys, it’s not me saying you have to go.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The minute they’ve gone I feel guilty. It is very plain that bustle soothes Price and makes her feel secure; the busier and noisier the house, the happier she is. “Even when I was young,” she agrees, “it was always the same, always horses and animals, my family was so sociable and outgoing, and it still is like that. You know, anyone could just turn up, ‘Cup of tea, yeah? Come in!’ It’s always packed. We’re people people.”
There is nothing dead-eyed about Price this time. In an old pair of tracksuit bottoms and one of Harvey’s T-shirts, artifice-free and insistently charismatic, she talks at full pelt and gives the impression of someone trying hard to connect. Her default setting is more broadcast than receive, so she doesn’t tend to listen very carefully, but openness is clearly central to her self-image and she wants me to know she is the opposite of controlling.
“I’ve got nothing to hide. My
Mucky Mansion, they’ve been filming here since July, they film wherever they want to and I’m happy, cos I am who I am, welcome to my home, I love filming, I love sharing, I just love it. The camera crew say to me I’m one of the only people they’ve ever met who’s exactly the same on camera as off.”
Her “mucky mansion” in West Sussex
SPLASH NEWS
The other pillar of her self-image is betrayal. Believing herself wronged by practically every person she has ever met — animated by outrage, simultaneously resigned — Price appears to exist in a perma-froth of indignation.
With the possible exception of Woods — about whom Price seems undecided — she says every single man she’s ever dated has cheated on her (Andre has always denied that he did). “Kieran even had an affair with the woman I bought the guinea pigs from.” When they’re not sleeping with her husbands, people are “always trying to make money out of me”.
Apart from her family and a handful of old friends, does literally everyone she knows sell a story about her? Without hesitation: “Yes.” She no longer employs cleaners because they “always” do. “I just don’t trust anyone.”
Giving a guided tour of its interior on YouTube
Criticism of her as a mother cuts her to the quick. She knows people accuse her of overexposing her children on social media, of lacking domestic boundaries — and she is having none of it. “I’ve got five kids, I’ve got animals, I’ve got a house to run, I’m the breadwinner and I just do it by myself. I wouldn’t have it any other way. You don’t have kids to pass them off to nannies, you don’t have kids to put them in boarding school. If you’re going to have kids, then you involve them in your life.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Paparazzi trespass on her property, hide in bushes, fly drones over her house. “I get paranoid. I feel like I’m being followed — and normally I am.” The police won’t protect her. “If I was a normal person called Linda, going in my car, and I said, ‘I’ve got six guys following me,’ the police would be there straight away. But as soon as they know it’s Katie Price, ‘Oh, nothing we can do.’ But I’m still vulnerable and scared.” Are her neighbours protective? “I think they’ve sold stories on me too.”
ITV had not provided any security when she was carjacked and raped in South Africa, she says, “and they wouldn’t do that to Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, would they? If they went away they’d have security people licking their arses, sweeping the f***ing floor for them. I’m the type of person who’ll stay in the same hotel as the crew, because they get cheaper hotels than the talent. Because I’m me, and I’m humble, people take advantage of it. Look what happened. I have to live with that for the rest of my life.”
Price and her ex-fiancé Leandro Penna are mobbed by photographers as they sit in her car in 2012
REX
Price used to give paid interviews to celebrity magazines such as OK! but now feels betrayed by them too. “I’m sick to death of every week them writing stuff on me. Horrible, hurtful stuff. And it does eventually affect you. And I think, so why am I going to do a shoot with you, and you’d be nice to me
that week, and then the next week be horrible again? Loyalty is a massive thing for me,” she says.
Earlier in her career she used to think her relationship with the tabloids was good, but the press, she says, “destroyed me”. “I get stuff written about me, they just think they can write anything. And it’s damaging for me. And it does damage my work.”
She brightens as she tells me about her idea for a TV show in which she will take her revenge. “What I’ve done, I’ve kept every single article, I’ve found a lawyer, and HBO and Netflix want to do a documentary on it. So I’m going to go back to the papers and sue them for every story that they can’t prove was true.” She gives a triumphant nod. “I’ll prove they’re wrong and at the same time, ching-ching. Thank you very much. Watch
that.”
Price is happy to talk to me because “you’re a respectable journalist”. The trouble comes when I suggest we could therefore take this opportunity to correct some of the record.
Her engagement to Woods is, she tells me emphatically, still on. “Don’t believe what you read,” she chides. “You should know that.” The drinking and drug-taking was “years ago”, she goes on. “Check my fridge, I don’t even have alcohol. I’m not even a big drinker. OK, I did self-medicate when I was with Kieran. He cheated on me seven times that I could prove, the bankruptcy thing was starting, I had three kidnap threats, so I think anyone would lose the plot then. So yeah, I self-medicated then. But that’s not the person I am. That was, like, three years ago.”
MENU
sunday december 18 2022
The Sunday Times Magazine
INTERVIEW
Katie Price: ‘I don’t need men’s validation any more’
The former page 3 model and reality star speaks to Decca Aitkenhead about therapy, family and longing for a drama-free life
Katie Price, 44, as she is today
SOPHIA SPRING FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
Decca Aitkenhead
Sunday December 18 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
Five of Katie Price’s dogs have been locked in the stables before I arrive at her farmhouse. “Because otherwise,” she assures me, “it would be
chaos!”
The non-chaotic scene in her kitchen therefore looks like this: Price, 44, is perched on a high stool in rollers; her make-up artist is working on her face; her nine-year-old son, Jett, is on a sofa; her severely autistic 20-year-old son, Harvey, is on his iPad; her 32-year-old half-sister, Sophie, is at the table. Then we have the photographer, two photographic assistants, Price’s old friend Ross and her hairdresser, who goes by the stage name of Mikey Kardashian and is fondly recalling the occasion of Jett’s birth, when he fitted hair extensions to Price as she lay on her hospital bed, catheter still in situ, recovering from an emergency caesarean. “We’ve done some weird old jobs together, haven’t we?” There are painters and decorators in the room next door, radio blaring — and there is Blade, a big black dog Price has to grab hold of each time the front door opens to another new arrival.
“Don’t let it bang!” is the perpetual refrain. “Harvey smashed my front window yesterday cos someone slammed it,” she explains. “That’s what triggers him … Blade! Come here! Is anyone cold? I’m always cold. I’ve got the radiators on full but it’s crazy, the oil heating bill’s three grand every four or five weeks. Blade, here! Would anyone like a cup of tea? Don’t look at the mess. Five kids, six dogs, six horses and no help. Whenever things calm down there’s another thing. And a-
nother thing.”
“And-a-
nother thing,” Jett sings along softly from the sofa.
In the 12 years since I last interviewed Price, it has indeed been one thing after another. Even back then her life already seemed unfathomably eventful. Propelled to fame by page 3 at just 17, the glamour model formerly known as Jordan had built a celebrity empire on her implausibly pneumatic figure and remorselessly public private life. A premiership footballer, Dwight Yorke, had abandoned her while pregnant, leaving her to raise their profoundly disabled son, Harvey, alone. Reality TV cameras had followed every moment of her first marriage to the pop star Peter Andre, whom she met in the Australian jungle in 2004 on
I’m a Celebrity. Their 2009 divorce was as ugly as their OK! wedding had been candy pink, and the pair have been feuding over their two children, Junior, 17, and Princess, 15, ever since. In 2010 she had just married Alex Reid, a cross-dressing cage fighter, and was reported to be worth £30 million, having monetised every twist and turn of the drama through reality TV shows, product lines, photoshoots, autobiographies, children’s books, even novels, none of which she wrote but one of which famously outsold an entire Booker prize shortlist.
ADVERTISEMENT
I remember a disconcertingly dead-eyed quality in Price when we met. Her internal life appeared indivisible from the bottom line, as if all human emotion had been transplanted by commercial calculation. The closest this country may ever come to its own Kim Kardashian, with her fortune secured Price struck me then as bulletproof. I could not have been more wrong.
As a teenager in Brighton, 1995
REX
The following year she split from Reid, and in 2013 married a part-time stripper and decorator, Kieran Hayler, five weeks after meeting him and already pregnant with Jett. A daughter, Bunny, followed in 2014, but by then Price had discovered Hayler’s affair with one of her oldest friends. Another affair with another of her closest friends soon emerged and the marriage ended in 2017 when she discovered he had also been sleeping with their nanny.
In 2018 she was carjacked at gunpoint in South Africa and raped — she was there filming a reality show for ITV with her family — after which she suffered a mental breakdown, attempted suicide and was treated at the Priory for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In 2019 she was declared bankrupt owing £3.2 million, convicted of driving while disqualified and issued with a restraining order against Hayler’s new partner following ugly scenes in a school playground. The following year she admitted to self-medicating with cocaine, returned to the Priory and began a relationship with a former
Love Island contestant, Carl Woods.
Price was readmitted to the Priory again last year after flipping her BMW while on cocaine and over the limit, and received a suspended prison sentence. She narrowly avoided jail again twice this year, once for breaching the terms of her insolvency and again for breaching the restraining order, for which she received 170 hours of community service. One week before our meeting Woods announced on Instagram that their relationship was over and accused her of cheating on him.
SPONSORED
This account is not even close to exhaustive. In between there have been burglaries, BBC documentaries, kidnap plots, toy boys, facelifts, fiancés, OnlyFans, boob jobs, a YouTube channel and the relentless challenge of caring for Harvey’s complex medical needs. Born partially blind, with a rare condition called Prader-Willi syndrome, her eldest son will always need intensive specialist care and violent outbursts are a fact of daily life. Price is undergoing tests for ADHD and is still recovering from an accident while on holiday in Turkey two years ago when she fell off a wall and broke both of her feet. Her beloved mother, Amy, 70, is terminally ill. The Instagram accounts of Price and her various exes function as a running commentary on the relentless drama, while the gossip sites run stories about her practically every day.
How any one person could withstand all of this is mind-boggling. I wanted to sit down with her to try and make some sense of it. To say that Price does not love the press would be quite the understatement, so I was surprised when my request for an interview received an enthusiastic yes. It is a less welcome surprise to discover she expects it to take place in the midst of the commotion in her kitchen, surrounded by nine other people and a dog.
Price with her children in 2020, from left, Junior, Harvey, Jett, Princess and Bunny
W8MEDIA
“Well, I’ve only got this room,” she says, explaining that she has just finished filming a new series of
Katie Price’s Mucky Mansion for Channel 4, chronicling her attempts to restore the West Sussex property following a catalogue of break-ins, vandalism and disrepair, so is contractually forbidden to grant any other media access to the rest of the 19-room farmhouse. “But don’t mind this lot,” she offers cheerfully. “They’ve heard it all before.”
And there’s the problem. At ease among her audience, Price happily riffs along familiar lines — “I’ve put in all white carpets upstairs, I know, I must be mad,” and so on — retreading old anecdotes and jokes until I have to put my foot down. Looking faintly puzzled but eager to be agreeable, in the end she reluctantly packs four of them off to a nearby garden centre, waving them out the door with, “Sorry, guys, it’s not me saying you have to go.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The minute they’ve gone I feel guilty. It is very plain that bustle soothes Price and makes her feel secure; the busier and noisier the house, the happier she is. “Even when I was young,” she agrees, “it was always the same, always horses and animals, my family was so sociable and outgoing, and it still is like that. You know, anyone could just turn up, ‘Cup of tea, yeah? Come in!’ It’s always packed. We’re people people.”
There is nothing dead-eyed about Price this time. In an old pair of tracksuit bottoms and one of Harvey’s T-shirts, artifice-free and insistently charismatic, she talks at full pelt and gives the impression of someone trying hard to connect. Her default setting is more broadcast than receive, so she doesn’t tend to listen very carefully, but openness is clearly central to her self-image and she wants me to know she is the opposite of controlling.
“I’ve got nothing to hide. My
Mucky Mansion, they’ve been filming here since July, they film wherever they want to and I’m happy, cos I am who I am, welcome to my home, I love filming, I love sharing, I just love it. The camera crew say to me I’m one of the only people they’ve ever met who’s exactly the same on camera as off.”
Her “mucky mansion” in West Sussex
SPLASH NEWS
The other pillar of her self-image is betrayal. Believing herself wronged by practically every person she has ever met — animated by outrage, simultaneously resigned — Price appears to exist in a perma-froth of indignation.
With the possible exception of Woods — about whom Price seems undecided — she says every single man she’s ever dated has cheated on her (Andre has always denied that he did). “Kieran even had an affair with the woman I bought the guinea pigs from.” When they’re not sleeping with her husbands, people are “always trying to make money out of me”.
Apart from her family and a handful of old friends, does literally everyone she knows sell a story about her? Without hesitation: “Yes.” She no longer employs cleaners because they “always” do. “I just don’t trust anyone.”
Giving a guided tour of its interior on YouTube
Criticism of her as a mother cuts her to the quick. She knows people accuse her of overexposing her children on social media, of lacking domestic boundaries — and she is having none of it. “I’ve got five kids, I’ve got animals, I’ve got a house to run, I’m the breadwinner and I just do it by myself. I wouldn’t have it any other way. You don’t have kids to pass them off to nannies, you don’t have kids to put them in boarding school. If you’re going to have kids, then you involve them in your life.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Paparazzi trespass on her property, hide in bushes, fly drones over her house. “I get paranoid. I feel like I’m being followed — and normally I am.” The police won’t protect her. “If I was a normal person called Linda, going in my car, and I said, ‘I’ve got six guys following me,’ the police would be there straight away. But as soon as they know it’s Katie Price, ‘Oh, nothing we can do.’ But I’m still vulnerable and scared.” Are her neighbours protective? “I think they’ve sold stories on me too.”
ITV had not provided any security when she was carjacked and raped in South Africa, she says, “and they wouldn’t do that to Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, would they? If they went away they’d have security people licking their arses, sweeping the f***ing floor for them. I’m the type of person who’ll stay in the same hotel as the crew, because they get cheaper hotels than the talent. Because I’m me, and I’m humble, people take advantage of it. Look what happened. I have to live with that for the rest of my life.”
Price and her ex-fiancé Leandro Penna are mobbed by photographers as they sit in her car in 2012
REX
Price used to give paid interviews to celebrity magazines such as OK! but now feels betrayed by them too. “I’m sick to death of every week them writing stuff on me. Horrible, hurtful stuff. And it does eventually affect you. And I think, so why am I going to do a shoot with you, and you’d be nice to me
that week, and then the next week be horrible again? Loyalty is a massive thing for me,” she says.
Earlier in her career she used to think her relationship with the tabloids was good, but the press, she says, “destroyed me”. “I get stuff written about me, they just think they can write anything. And it’s damaging for me. And it does damage my work.”
She brightens as she tells me about her idea for a TV show in which she will take her revenge. “What I’ve done, I’ve kept every single article, I’ve found a lawyer, and HBO and Netflix want to do a documentary on it. So I’m going to go back to the papers and sue them for every story that they can’t prove was true.” She gives a triumphant nod. “I’ll prove they’re wrong and at the same time, ching-ching. Thank you very much. Watch
that.”
Price is happy to talk to me because “you’re a respectable journalist”. The trouble comes when I suggest we could therefore take this opportunity to correct some of the record.
Her engagement to Woods is, she tells me emphatically, still on. “Don’t believe what you read,” she chides. “You should know that.” The drinking and drug-taking was “years ago”, she goes on. “Check my fridge, I don’t even have alcohol. I’m not even a big drinker. OK, I did self-medicate when I was with Kieran. He cheated on me seven times that I could prove, the bankruptcy thing was starting, I had three kidnap threats, so I think anyone would lose the plot then. So yeah, I self-medicated then. But that’s not the person I am. That was, like, three years ago.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Except, I point out, that she tested positive for cocaine when she crashed her BMW last year. “No, that was just drink, that one. I was just drinking. But that’s the papers again.”
The BMW she crashed while high and drunk in 2021
ENTERPRISE NEWS AND PICTURES
Is it? The BBC covered her court case following the accident and reported: “Price was taken to hospital, where she told police, ‘I took drugs, I should not be driving, I admit it all.’ The court heard a drugs wipe gave a positive reading for cocaine.”
She fumes about tradespeople wary of her financial situation. “Because they believe the word ‘bankrupt’, I get judged for it. But I don’t let it get to me now; I just think, OK, if you don’t want my business cos you believe what you read, then you lose out. Bankruptcy’s just, like, a word. But I don’t let it affect me, cos I know the truth.”
Price is, without a shadow of a doubt, still bankrupt. Her next court hearing on the matter is scheduled for February, but when I double-check the date with her she looks bored. “I don’t know. If you’ve read that … I don’t know. I don’t let it affect me. Everything’s sorted.”
Every time I try to get to the bottom of anything, she says: “I don’t want this whole interview to be doom and gloom.” I thought we were trying to set the record straight? “Well, it’s sounding all doom and gloom. What you can say is I’ve been through real shit and I’ve come out the other end, which is amazing.”
The very next night she will announce on Instagram: “Yeah, I’m single.” Hours later Woods posts audio footage on his Instagram account of Price talking about taking cocaine during their relationship.
Price is immensely likeable and at times surprisingly guileless, but her relationship with the truth can be highly unreliable. One possible explanation would be commercial: she may be guarding material for her next autobiography. Another might involve legal constraints, as there have been various injunctions and gagging orders over the years. My guess would be that it’s more psychologically complicated than that. Most of the time I think she believes whatever she says at any given moment to be true — or at least, no more of a lie than anything anyone else in her world says. Contradictory reports about her appeared almost hourly online last week; every time I thought I’d got things straight, they changed again. After just a few weeks immersed in this fog of confusion, my head was spinning, so what it’s like to be inside hers I do not like to think. It is easy to see how the very notion of truth could have got lost along the way.
What’s certainly true is that she has suffered multiple traumas, even long before she became famous. Born in Brighton, she was four when her dad walked out on her and her mother. Her stepfather, a builder, has been a constant in her life, but her biological father vanished from her world for good. At just six years old she was sexually assaulted in a park. She left school at 16 to train as a nurse, but when a friend suggested modelling she submitted photos to page 3, and underwent her first breast enlargement at 20. Countless further cosmetic surgeries transformed her into a cartoonish fantasy of male desire.
“If you want me to say I’m addicted to surgery,” she says dully, sounding resigned, “I’ll say I’m addicted.” She says she has endured a lifetime of “gaslighting and mental abuse” from men — and yet still she craved their approval.
“You don’t have to be a genius to work out that men are the downfall in my life. A million per cent,” she says. “All my dramas, my bankruptcy — everything is men. Always men. That is it.” All of her money has gone on men, she says — spending it on them to keep them, paying lawyers to divorce them and funding hefty settlements. “When you see exes gloat around, knowing you’ve paid for stuff, that’s the worst torment for me,” she says, with raw feeling.
“My triggers, when I’ve gone downhill, are men. And I’m a sucker for love. I used to need validation. Men’s approval. Wanting them to want me … but they don’t.” Her face lights up when she talks about how therapy has helped. “It’s amazing, because you have to learn to love yourself. So I don’t need their validation now, I don’t need it any more.” She says this with such poignant earnestness, I can only hope she is right.
Court no longer holds any fear for Price; after so many appearances “I’m numb to it”. Does she worry that her luck could run out and she may wind up in prison? “If I do I’ll write a chapter for my next book and it will earn me money,” she flashes back with more characteristic defiance. “And I love peace and quiet. That’s the attitude I have. So there you go. Answered that.” She seems to feel not so much prosecuted as persecuted — “Well, if they’re just going to keep going,” she shrugs with unconvincing nonchalance, “then just put me in there.”
She has thoroughly enjoyed doing community service, however, at a food bank in Horsham. “Loved it! And they loved me there.” Her face lights up again. “Yeah, I’ve offered to be a volunteer. And the Samaritans in Brighton have asked, and I want to do that. I’ve got a lot more hours left to do. It’s nice to do something different and give something back.” On this, I absolutely believe her.
In January she intends to enrol in a course to learn how to administer injectable cosmetic treatments — “Botox, fillers, all that. I’ve had enough of them in my life to know what’s good and what’s not.” The plan is to open her own beauty salon in the annexe of her farmhouse. “Well, I’ve got the car parking, and I pay council tax on the bloody thing, so I might as well use it.”
This doesn’t sound like a thoroughly well thought-out plan, but she has already come up with a name for the clinic. “Carl was going to do it with me, so it’s ‘Barbie and Ken’. Why not?” Well, trademark regulations, for one. “Yeah, I might have to change a letter or something to make it look different. But that’s genius. Why not?”
EROTEME
I ask if she can imagine ever leading a drama-free life. “I would
love it. Oh, I crave it. I’m trying to do it now. I don’t want drama. I’ve sorted myself out. I’ve got help, I do therapy. I’m in control and happy now. It’s all set.”
That night she will gatecrash the stage at a gay bar in Soho and seize the mike for an impromptu duet with a startled singer. Hours later Woods will post, then delete, the audio footage of Price talking about taking cocaine. That weekend the pair are reportedly spotted together at her son Jett’s football game, and rumoured to be back together. The following week her ex-husband Hayler is arrested on suspicion of stalking and interviewed by police before being released. Price and I are due to talk again on Zoom a few days later, but half an hour beforehand her sister emails to say she is unwell. The following day Price is reported to have “fled the country” — or alternatively “gone skiing” — with her two youngest children and Woods. And so it goes on.
Apologies if any of that duplicated as used my phone!
www.thesun.co.uk
