Science & Environment
Katie Price is UK showbiz’s great survivor – but…
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No one does drama like Katie Price. After almost 30 years of tabloid notoriety, from her short-lived singing career to her Cinderella-style wedding, the model and reality star now seems to be embroiled in her most chaotic chapter yet. On 30 July, a warrant for Price’s arrest was issued after the 46-year-old failed to turn up for a bankruptcy court hearing about an unpaid tax bill. It’s the second time she has been declared bankrupt.
Price was in fact abroad, apparently filming a documentary about cosmetic procedures – in Istanbul, Europe’s de facto capital of plastic surgery, no less. She has since put out a defiant statement on Instagram, claiming that she is “not running” from her troubles. “Despite consistent stories trying to humiliate me on my personal misfortunes, I am neither embarrassed nor ashamed,” she said. “I own my situation and I am trying my best to work my way out of it and put matters right.” Then on Thursday evening (8 August), she was arrested at Heathrow Airport and remanded in custody at a west London police station.
It’s all a far cry from the peak of her career success in the mid-Noughties, when she was estimated to have a net worth of around £40m thanks to a sprawling empire encompassing fashion deals, fitness DVDs and books (the latter being so successful that in 2007, her novel Crystal outsold the entire Booker Prize shortlist).
This current saga seems to have all the hallmarks of a Price-centric media storm: money woes, the looming threat of legal trouble, cosmetic surgery. It has provided plenty more ammunition for her detractors. Glance through the showbiz section of any British tabloid’s website right now and you will probably see headlines screaming about Price’s “SIXTH facelift” or the fate of her so-called “mucky mansion” (aka her home in Sussex, a property that the tabloids would have you believe to be in a constant state of terminal decline, the Heat mag version of Miss Havisham’s house). But the model formerly known as Jordan also has a history of shrugging off these low ebbs: stories about her “rise and fall” have been written over and over again, but she always seems to defy them. Price is the great survivor of British showbiz. Not for nothing is her motto: “Never underestimate the Pricey.”
Price has spent her entire adulthood in the spotlight. She sent photos off to a modelling agency, then The Sun featured her on Page Three in 1996, all when she was aged just 18. The paper needed a name to put alongside the photos, so she and her agent came up with Jordan, “because it sounded catchier than Katie”. She’d go on to become a fixture in lads’ mags and famously went under the knife again and again for a series of pneumatic boob jobs. She was the ultimate glamour model, building a lucrative career against the backdrop of Nineties and Noughties lad culture – and her romances with fellow celebrities like singer Dane Bowers, Ace off of Gladiators and Gareth Gates meant that even if she wasn’t appearing scantily clad in a photo shoot, she was never away from the tabloids for very long.
Then the first of her many reinventions came in 2004, when she signed up to take part in the third season of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! In the Australian jungle, she’d meet Peter Andre, then best known as the minor pop star who’d sung “Mysterious Girl” under a waterfall once upon a Nineties music video. Viewers watched the pair fall in love and seemed to take them into their hearts, too. The larger-than-life “Jordan” was superseded by the more relatable “Katie”, who was funny, vulnerable, authentic and a devoted single mother. Her son Harvey was born partially blind in 2002, and also has the rare genetic condition Prader-Willi syndrome; his father, footballer Dwight Yorke, has never had any relationship with him, meaning Price has largely brought him up alone.
The couple would later marry in a fairytale-style ceremony at Highclere Castle in Hampshire – the stately home now best known as the filming location for Downton Abbey – with Price arriving in a pink carriage pulled by white horses. Their relationship provided fodder for a seemingly endless stream of fly-on-the-wall reality shows. If you were flicking through channels and landed on ITV2 at any point in the mid-Noughties, there was a pretty high likelihood you’d land on a Katie & Peter-branded show, documenting the pair’s wedding preparations, pregnancies and parenthood (the couple had two children, Junior, born in 2005, and Princess, born in 2007). So ubiquitous were they that in 2009, a pre-global fame Kim Kardashian excitedly tweeted: “Omg Katie Price aka Jordan and her husband Peter are on my flight home from NYC!”
The term “reality TV” is always best taken with a pinch of salt, but these programmes tended to sit on the more candid end of the spectrum. The couple didn’t shy away from showing their more fraught family moments; when they eventually split up in 2009, news broke that they’d still continue to document their lives, but in separate shows (Price’s, inevitably, was titled What Katie Did Next). Just as their relationship had been a source of public fascination, so was the break-up, with every detail endlessly chronicled in showbiz magazines and in tell-all TV interviews.
During this period, Price managed to establish herself as a bit of a multi-hyphenate – the Renaissance woman of hun culture (Price is, inevitably, a major player in this online celebration of the UK’s camp-adjacent female celebs). She lent her name to perfumes, bedding and underwear; she even had a shot at representing the UK in Eurovision, and released a cover of “A Whole New World” from Aladdin with Andre. A long time equestrian, she launched a range of riding clothes (and bright pink horse leg warmers) after getting fed up with the “dull and boring” outfits on the market. Around this time, a Guardian interview with Price ran under the headline: “Who wants to be a billionaire? Katie Price does – and she might even make it.”
Perhaps most successful of all were her books. Her first memoir Being Jordan earned £4.7 million in sales when it was released in 2004; that led to a six-figure deal with publishers Random House. Her debut novel Angel arrived in 2006, chronicling the story of a “young, beautiful and sexy” aspiring model who is catapulted into a showbiz milieu and falls for a boy band star who is “as irresistible as he is dangerous”. A shocked-sounding Evening Standard reviewer conceded that it was “genuinely amusing and readable”. Angel sold 300,000 copies in its first six weeks; follow-up Crystal was another bestseller. The numbers didn’t lie: the British public were clearly fascinated by her, even if they didn’t care to admit it, or couched that fascination in snarky comments.
The British public were clearly fascinated by her, even if they didn’t care to admit it
But following her well-documented split from Andre, Price’s personal life became increasingly messy. There was a short-lived marriage to cage fighter Alex Reid in 2010, then another to sometime stripper Kieran Hayler three years later. The latter relationship broke down after she discovered that Hayler, the father of her two younger children Jett and Bunny, cheated on her with her close friend; they eventually patched things up to renew their vows, only to file for divorce in 2018.
What followed was a particularly tumultuous time for Price, who has called it her “breaking point”. While filming another ITV series in South Africa in 2018, her car was hijacked and she was raped at gunpoint. After this harrowing incident, she developed PTSD and attempted suicide; she’d later check into The Priory to seek treatment for alcohol and cocaine abuse. “When I was in the Priory my therapist said, ‘Kate, we’ve never known anyone to have so many traumatic events happen to them,’” she later told The Guardian. “And I’m still here, coping.” There were financial woes, too, when she was declared bankrupt for the first time in 2019. The following year, she broke both feet in a horrific fall during another trip to Turkey.
More recently, Price has joined OnlyFans, the subscription platform that tends to be synonymous with explicit content. Her account offers “exclusive footage, pictures and raw insight videos of my everyday life”; recently, she reportedly charged fans £53 for a video of her in the shower.
It’s a venture that has inevitably prompted further headlines, to add to the rolling coverage of her money troubles and the ongoing saga of the “mucky mansion”. But they don’t tell the full story, though. Beyond the tumultuous public persona, Price has always been a devoted parent and advocate for Harvey. She has campaigned to criminalise online abuse after seeing him mocked viciously by trolls, and in 2021 made the BBC documentary Harvey and Me. The film showed their strong bond and followed Price’s efforts to find suitable specialist care for her son as he reached adulthood. “For those who only know Price as a fixture in the tabloids, it may be a surprise to see her as the down-to-earth single mother of five … trying to do her best in unbelievably difficult circumstances,” The Independent’s review noted at the time.
Price has always embodied contradictions; she appears both extremely resilient and very vulnerable, a savvy media operator who increasingly seems to have lost control of the story. While other female stars who have struggled in the spotlight have since been given a redemptive reassessment – think Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson, to name a few – her story seems to resist that comfortable narrative because she’s deemed too “messy”. You have to wonder whether she’s in a catch-22 situation where she can only get out of her current troubles by leaning into and monetising her exaggerated persona. Speaking to the Sunday Times in 2022, she admitted: “If I do [go to prison], I’ll write a chapter for my next book and it will earn me money.” In her recent memoir This Is Me, she made the frank admission that she’d consider escort work as an income stream: “just for company. To be on their arm. I think I’d be good at that.”
Her next chapter, to borrow a name from one of her ITV series, may prove to be her most difficult yet. But don’t count against her eventual comeback. After all, you should never underestimate the Pricey.
