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northNo one does drama like Katie Price. After nearly 30 years of tabloid notoriety, from her brief singing career to her CinderellaAfter a wedding worthy of the famous country singer, the model and reality TV star now appears to be embroiled in her most chaotic chapter yet. On July 30, a warrant was issued for Price's arrest after the 46-year-old actress failed to show up for a bankruptcy court hearing over an unpaid tax bill. It is the second time she has filed for bankruptcy.
Price was abroad, apparently filming a documentary about cosmetic procedures – in Istanbul, no less, the de facto capital of plastic surgery in Europe. She has since posted a defiant statement on Instagram, claiming she is “not running away” from her problems. “Despite the constant stories trying to humiliate me for my personal misfortunes, I do not feel ashamed or guilty,” she said. “I own my situation and I am doing everything I can to get out of it and put things right.” Then, on Thursday night (August 8), she was arrested at Heathrow Airport and taken into custody at a west London police station.
This is all a far cry from the height of her professional success in the mid-2000s, when she was estimated to have a net worth of around £40m thanks to a sprawling empire spanning fashion deals, fitness DVDs and books (the latter of which were so successful that in 2007, her novel Glass outsold all the books shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
This current saga seems to have all the hallmarks of a Price-centric media storm: financial troubles, the looming threat of legal trouble, cosmetic surgery. It has provided plenty more ammunition for her detractors. Take a look at the entertainment section of any British tabloid's website right now and you'll likely see headlines screaming about Price's “SIXTH cosmetic surgery” or the fate of her so-called “dirty mansion” (i.e. her Sussex home, a property the tabloids would have you believe is in a constant state of terminal decay, the Heat But the model formerly known as Jordan also has a history of ignoring these lows: stories about her “rise and fall” have been written time and 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 face.”
Price has spent her entire adult life in the spotlight. She sent photos to a modeling agency and then… The sun Page Three magazine featured her in 1996, when she was just 18. The paper needed a name to put next to the photos, so she and her agent came up with Jordan, “because it sounded catchier than Katie.” She would become a fixture in lads' magazines, and famously went under the knife again and again for a series of pneumatic breast operations. She was the ultimate glamorous model, and built a lucrative career against the backdrop of 1990s and 2000s male culture, and her romances with other celebrities such as singer Dane Bowers, Ace of the Rings, and the likes of … Gladiators and Gareth Gates meant that even if she didn't appear half-naked in a photo shoot, she was never far from the tabloids for long.
Then, the first of his many reinventions came in 2004, when he signed up to participate in the third season of I'm a celebrity… Get me out of here! In the Australian jungle, she met Peter Andre, then best known as the minor pop star who sang “Mysterious Girl” under a waterfall in a 1990s music video. Viewers watched the pair fall in love and seemed to welcome them into their hearts, too. The larger-than-life “Jordan” was replaced by the more relatable “Katie,” who was funny, vulnerable, authentic and a devoted single mother. Their 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 raised him 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 material for a seemingly endless stream of reality TV shows. If you were flipping through the channels and landed on ITV2 at any time in the mid-2000s, there was a pretty high chance you'd land on a Katie and Peter-brand show, which documents the couple’s wedding preparations, pregnancies and parenthood (the couple had two children, Junior, born in 2005, and Princess, born in 2007). They were so ubiquitous that in 2009, a pre-world-famous Kim Kardashian excitedly tweeted: “OMG Katie Price aka Jordan and her husband Peter are on my flight home from NYC!”
The term “reality television” is always taken with a grain of salt, but these shows tended to be at the more candid end of the spectrum. The couple didn't shy away from showing their more tense family moments; when they finally split in 2009, it emerged that they would continue to document their lives, but on separate shows (Price's, inevitably, was titled What did Katie do next?). Just as their relationship had been a source of public fascination, so too was their breakup, with every detail endlessly recounted in showbiz magazines and revealing television interviews.
During this period, Price managed to establish herself as a multi-talented woman – the renaissance woman of Hun culture (Price is, inevitably, a major figure in this online celebration of UK female celebrities approaching showbiz). She lent her name to perfumes, bed linen and underwear; she even had the chance to represent the UK at Eurovision and released a cover of Hun's “A Whole New World”. Aladdin with Andre. A long-time equestrian, he launched a range of riding clothes (and bright pink horse leg warmers) after growing tired of the “bland and boring” outfits on the market. At the time, Guardian The interview with Price was titled: “Who wants to be a billionaire? Katie Price does, and she might just make it.”
Perhaps the greatest success of all was his books. His first memoirs Being Jordan In 2004, when it was published, it grossed £4.7m in sales, earning her a six-figure contract with publisher Random House. Her first novel Angel It arrived in 2006 and tells the story of a “young, beautiful and sexy” aspiring model who catapults herself into the world of show business and falls in love with the star of a boy band who is “as irresistible as he is dangerous.” Evening Standard The critic admitted that it was “really fun and readable.” Angel sold 300,000 copies in its first six weeks; follow-up Glass It was another best-seller. The numbers didn't lie: the British public was clearly fascinated by it, even if they didn't want to admit it or they disguised their fascination with sarcastic comments.
The British public were clearly fascinated by her, although they didn't mind admitting it.
But after her well-documented split from Andre, Price's personal life became increasingly complicated. In 2010 she briefly married cage fighter Alex Reid and three years later to stripper Kieran Hayler. The latter relationship broke down after she discovered that Hayler, the father of her two youngest children Jett and Bunny, was cheating on her with her close friend; they eventually patched things up and renewed their vows, but in 2018 they filed for divorce.
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. Following this harrowing incident, she developed PTSD and attempted suicide; she later checked herself into The Priory to seek treatment for alcohol and cocaine abuse. “When I was at The Priory, my therapist said to me, ‘Kate, we’ve never met anyone who’s had so many traumatic events,’” she later told The Associated Press. The Guardian“And I’m still here, dealing with it.” She also struggled financially when she filed for bankruptcy for the first time in 2019. The following year, she broke both feet in a terrible fall during another trip to Turkey.
More recently, Price joined OnlyFans, the subscription platform that is often synonymous with explicit content. Her account offers “exclusive images, photographs and videos with a raw look at my everyday life” – she recently reportedly charged her followers £53 for a video of herself in the shower.
It's an adventure that has inevitably sparked more headlines, adding to the ongoing coverage of their financial woes and the ongoing saga of the “dirty mansion.” But they don't tell the full story, however. Beyond the tumultuous public persona, Price has always been a devoted mother and defender of Harvey. She has campaigned to criminalize online abuse after seeing him viciously mocked by trolls, and in 2021 made the BBC documentary Harvey and IThe film showcased 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 tabloid fixture, it may come as a surprise to see her as the down-to-earth single mother of five children… trying to do the best she can in incredibly difficult circumstances.” The IndependentReview of 's noted at that time.
Price has always embodied contradictions; she seems both extremely resilient and very vulnerable, a skilled media operator who increasingly seems to have lost control of the story. While other female stars who have struggled in the spotlight have since received a redemptive reappraisal (think Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson, to name a few), her story seems to resist that comfortable narrative because it is seen as too “messy.” One has to wonder if she is in a no-win situation where she can only get out of her current troubles by leaning on her exaggerated persona and monetizing her image. In an interview with the magazine Sunday morning In 2022, he admitted: “If I do it [go to prison]I'll write a chapter for my next book and make money.” In his recent memoirs This is meShe candidly admitted that she would consider escort work as a source of income: “Just to keep people company. To be on someone's arm. I think I'd be good at it.”
Her next chapter, to borrow the name of one of her ITV series, may prove to be her most difficult yet. But that's not to be counted on for her return to be imminent. After all, you should never underestimate the Pricey.
