Katie Price floats into the garden of her local country club in Sussex as serene as a swan, though that may be because, less than 24 hours ago, she was under a general anaesthetic, having her 17th breast job (this time, a reduction).
The operation took place in Brussels, so she’s also had to travel back to her home in Sussex, her 32-year-old boyfriend JJ driving them via the delayed Eurotunnel, meaning she didn’t reach her bed until gone midnight. It’s now 9.30am, and aside from a slight tiredness and a glimpse of surgical dressing below her sports top, I’d barely know that the woman in front of me had just had major surgery.
‘It’s not a big deal,’ she says nonchalantly, before ordering a cup of tea.
‘It’s a massive deal,’ I reply, wanting to wrap her in cotton wool and send her home to bed.
Katie Price wears a black dress, karenmillen.com
‘No, it’s not,’ she insists. And she’s right, of course. In the world of Katie Price, a little thing like cosmetic surgery barely registers on the Richter scale of events worth mentioning. The day we meet, for example, the papers are full of photos of bailiffs repossessing her £2 million, 19-bedroom ‘Mucky Mansion’, a house Price tells me is ‘cursed’. And tomorrow, she’ll pick up her car from the garage, where it’s been for two weeks after someone threw acid at it.
That sounds frightening, I say.
‘Yeah,’ she sighs. She’s fresh-faced, wearing trainers and matching pink leisurewear, her dark hair scraped back in a ponytail, and is worrying about a nail that she’s broken. ‘I called the police. I said, “I know you’re saying there’s nothing you can do, but if I’d walked out in the middle of the night and I saw them putting acid on [the car], who’s to say they wouldn’t have thrown it at me?” That’s the way I look at it. It’s a threat.’
After two bankruptcies, she’s now living in a new home that is smaller and less showy, ‘and no one knows where it is and I f***ing love it.’ Does she feel safe? ‘I’ve got a guard dog coming on Monday,’ she explains, as if she is talking about a supermarket delivery.
‘Anyway, I’ve had to have it repainted,’ she says of the vehicle, perking up. ‘So it’ll be like getting a new car. Can’t wait. There’s going to be more glitter.’ Which strikes me as a neat metaphor for Katie Price. You can attack her all you want, but she’ll just come back, looking even more glittery, and probably with a brand spanking new paint job.
We are meeting to discuss Price’s new book, This is Me. It’s her seventh memoir, but even by her standards, it is staggeringly honest, her attempt to show people she is a ‘person, not a product’. ‘It’s a different kind of book, this one,’ she says. ‘It’s about what I’ve been through.’
And Price has been through a lot in her 46 years, from her very public divorces from singer Peter Andre, cagefighter Alex Reid and dancer Kieran Hayler, a carjack and robbery while filming for ITV in South Africa, to raising five children, one of whom, 22-year-old Harvey, has a serious disability (his father is former footballer Dwight Yorke). Her other children are Junior, 19, and Princess, 17, Jett, ten, and Bunny, nine.
Then there are the endless financial difficulties: while she was worth a reported £30 million in 2010, nine years later she was declared bankrupt with debts of over £3.2 million, then in March this year she was bankrupt for a second time due to an unpaid tax bill of £750,000. She says that this has been settled.
‘I’m lucky that I always earn good money,’ she says. ‘Everyone goes through bankruptcies. Everyone goes through liquidations. It’s normal and it just makes you stronger. At the end of the day, money means s**t to me because you can’t take it with you, and it doesn’t buy health.’
Even so, I tell her that just one of those things would be enough to knock most people off their perches, and yet here Price is, nearly 30 years on, one of showbusiness’s great survivors. ‘It’s like I’ve been in a washing machine,’ she nods. ‘I’ve been washed and washed. But I’ve come out with knowledge. I’m Kate, and I’m doing it my way now.’
Many people think they know all there is to know about Price, from her glamour modelling career years as Jordan, to her relationship with Andre, the early stages of which were played out on national television, in the I’m A Celebrity… jungle.
Her love of boob jobs and bad boys such as singer Dane Bowers and Yorke has led to her becoming a very particular kind of national treasure, often mocked, frequently caricatured and rarely, if ever, understood.
With This is Me she hopes to change all that. It is a difficult read, featuring medical records that show the detail of a suicide attempt in 2020, and the abuse she experienced as a child. One of Price’s earliest memories, recounted candidly in the book, was the ‘bald head with wisps of ginger hair’ that belonged to the man who sexually assaulted her in a local park when she was just seven.
Dress, stylist’s own
Then there was the time, aged 13, that she began modelling for a jeans brand in her home town, Brighton. The photographer turned out to be a paedophile, who would make her ‘pose in suspenders and all sorts of adult stuff, making me stick my tongue out, too’.
At 16, she lost her virginity to a 25-year-old who had just come out of prison. ‘He kicked me in the belly when I was pregnant and I lost the baby,’ she writes in the book.
‘People don’t realise what I’ve been through,’ she says now. They don’t know, for example, that she tried to take her own life, as she got divorced from her third husband, Hayler. ‘I just didn’t want to be here any more,’ she tells me. ‘I thought, “What’s the point? No one’s here, no one’s helping, no one understands what I am feeling.” I woke up from it thinking, “What the f**k? I can’t do this to my kids.” I was at breaking point.’
She went to private hospital the Priory, and realised that the suicide attempt was the culmination of a long breakdown. She had been taking cocaine as a means of escape, and this shocked her friends and family, because, she tells me, she isn’t an addict.
Katie on one of her first modelling shots, in the mid 1990s, before she had surgery
‘I think there’s this persona of me that I’m a drinker and a cokehead, but I never have been, ever. Yeah, when I was younger, I would go out and get p***ed. Who wouldn’t?’
And yet the drugs were a sign that things had got darker. ‘It [cocaine] is the dirtiest thing. When you’re not in a good place, it taps you on the shoulder and says, “I’m here, I can help you.” To me, it wasn’t a drug that made me want to party. It was more a way to block everything out, to suppress me completely. I was like this,’ she mimes looking down and in at herself. ‘It was like I was in rigor mortis.’
While most people who take cocaine get an intense high, it shut Price down. This is typical of people who suffer from ADHD, and it was after her stay in the Priory that she had a formal diagnosis.
‘I hate labels,’ she says, ‘but it’s made me understand more. I found all my school reports and they all say exactly the same thing: “Dreamer. Gets bored. So capable but gets easily distracted and doesn’t concentrate.” It all makes sense.’ Does she think her life might have been different if she had received a diagnosis as a child?
‘I don’t know. And maybe I wouldn’t be where I am today. So I don’t regret any of it, but now I am older, I can understand that I need to hold back and evaluate situations more.’
She has spent a lifetime being used by the people around her, from managers to boyfriends. ‘Men are my downfall,’ she tells me.
‘I’ve realised that every single relationship I’ve been in has been domestic abuse, whether it’s mental abuse, physical abuse, narcissistic behaviour, gaslighting. Been there, done that. I’ve never had a healthy relationship.’
Why does she think that is? ‘Because I’ve always been needy. Wanted validation. Rushed into things. I’ve done it all wrong. You don’t need to rush a relationship. You don’t need to get married. You don’t need to have a baby. Enjoy a relationship. Enjoy it with your friends and family. Why do I need a certificate? Why do I need to rush and get married? I don’t.’
The Priory has helped, as have all the courses she has taken it upon herself to do. ‘I’ve done my domestic abuse course, drugs misuse course, relationship courses. I’ve done so many.’ She’s learnt that she doesn’t need to react to everything. ‘Before, if an ex put something on Instagram directed at me, I would write something back and open a can of worms. Now I look at it and think, “Breathe”.’
She met her new boyfriend, JJ Slater, a menswear entrepreneur, on social media. He is a former contestant on Married at First Sight, but he genuinely appears to be more interested in her than the limelight that she brings. ‘He’s chilled,’ she smiles sweetly. He is here today, a presence so nondescript that at first I mistake him for some sort of assistant. In reality, Price doesn’t have a manager or a big team around her.
Katie with her new boyfriend, JJ Slater, earlier this year
‘I don’t trust anyone. I get burnt all the time. I have a small support group around me: my mum, sister, family, JJ.’ She is protective of those who look after her, including her biological father, Ray, who she rarely speaks about. I had assumed this was because they weren’t close, but she tells me it’s because ‘he’s quite private, and he’d rather stay that way. But he’s always been there in my life.’
Away from work, and drama, she says she leads a grounded life, enjoying visits to her mum, Amy, on the Isle of Wight. ‘My self-care is going horse riding with Bunny. We’ve both got our ponies. I go on bike rides with the kids. Have a facial, have a massage, just normal stuff, seeing my family.’
Today, she says, the most ruinous habit she has is her pineapple-flavoured vape, and she is no longer interested in drinking or partying: ‘I’ve been there, done it, and it’s all fake.’
There’s a sad moment in our interview where she tells me that, ‘I don’t know if anyone ever has had respect [for me].’ I tell her that I know many women who have a huge amount of respect for her, for the way she has campaigned on behalf of her son Harvey, who was born with Prader-Willi syndrome.
‘I’d like to do more of that,’ she nods, ‘but nobody is interested.’ There is still a problem with racism in this country, she explains, not to mention a huge stigma attached to disability. ‘I don’t know why. I’d love to see him [Harvey] on the cover of GQ, looking proper suave. But the industry is so boll***s, they wouldn’t do it, would they?’
Katie with all her children, from left, Junior, Harvey, Jett, Princess and Bunny in 2020
Price lights up when talking about Harvey. ‘I love him. We’re going to Turkey later this month, because it’s nice and hot and all he wants to do is go in the swimming pool with his big water bottle, and keep filling it up, saying, “Look, Mum, look at the bubbles!” And if there’s a fly, I have to go, “Go away fly! Come back later when it’s dark!” That’s me all day.’ You can tell by the smile on her face that she couldn’t be happier about it.
Her five children are everything to her, she says. ‘I want more,’ she admits, contradicting what she said earlier about not needing to have a baby with every relationship. ‘I’m very maternal. If I could have another two or three, I’d be happy.’
She tells me she has experienced three failed rounds of IVF in the past year. ‘I don’t mention it in the book. My eggs are too old,’ she shrugs. ‘I’ll get a donor egg.’
Just as Price has been through harder things than her numerous cosmetic surgeries, she has been through harder things than this. But I talk to her more about her nurturing, nesting side, whether it’s with her children or her many animals. I suggest to her that people tend to give out what they need themselves. ‘Yeah,’ she nods.
‘I’d be a great carer. I’m very patient and understanding and I just want to help. I love helping people, just love it, but people never see that.’
She tells me she would love to be a paramedic or perhaps a life coach. For now, though, she has the small matter of ‘bringing my empire back. I’ve got my book, I’ve got my perfume coming out, swimwear, underwear, all that. Exactly what I used to do before, but this time I’m in control and it’s mine. I’ve done a reset. I feel like I’ve started my career again. But I’m more powerful because I’ve got the knowledge now.
It’s on my terms, no one else’s.’
This is Me by Katie Price will be published on 18 July by Bonnier Books, price £22. To order a copy for £18.70 until 28 July go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
w8media/shutterstock, BACKGRID.
Picture director Ester Malloy
Fashion director: Sophie Dearden
Fashion assistant: Jessica Carroll
Hair & make-up: Stephanie-Emma Jeary using Mac and Dior
