Katie Price Interview: Star Reflects On Media Backlash And New Documentary

Few figures in British culture, be they politician, TV personality or sports star, will spark as strong a reaction just from mentioning their name as Katie Price.

Throughout her time in the spotlight, she’s been scrutinised over her career choices, her appearance, her relationships, her parenting and her personal struggles, and been branded a shameless opportunist, a fame-hungry wannabe, a shrewd businesswoman, a good-time girl, an iconic hun, a doting mum, a bad influence and, indeed, a survivor, depending on who you ask.

Her latest venture has seen her following in the footsteps of A-listers like Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue and both Sir David and Victoria Beckham by bringing us right back to where it all started in the retrospective documentary Katie Price: Nowhere To Hide, a four-part series that takes us through her “rollercoaster” time in the spotlight, offering her side of the headlines that have dominated her life and career.

Early on in the doc, which is a collaboration with Louis Theroux’s production company Mindhouse, Katie explains that she was motivated to offer up her version of events as she feels she’s “always been misunderstood”.

“You all think you know about me,” she tells HuffPost UK weeks before her documentary’s TV debut. “And to a degree, you do. You’ve seen me do reality TV, and I’ve grown up in the public eye since I was 17. But there’s also a lot you don’t know about me.”

“I’m going to take you on a rollercoaster journey,” she teases. “And at the end of it, you will be mentally exhausted.”

“But just imagine, if you’re mentally exhausted, how do you think I feel?” she quips. “It’s my life!”

As one of the most iconic pop culture figures of the 21st century, Katie’s story is already very well-documented, between her past fly-on-the-wall reality shows, her whopping eight autobiographies, years’ worth of candid social media posts and, of course, the continuous stream of articles that have been written about her – both fact and fiction – over the last 30 years.

Katie claims that while people will have “seen headlines” and “judged me on them”, her new documentary allows her to put forward not just her version of events and lived experiences, but those of her family, loved ones and other figures from her life who contributed to the series and witnessed it all firsthand.

“When I decided to do the documentary, I literally said, ‘you can interview anyone you like from the past to the present – anybody – and you can ask me any questions you want, no matter how hard or tricky or in-depth it is’,” she recalls.

Clearly, producers took Katie at her word, with the list of subjects interviewed for Nowhere To Hide encompassing family members (including two of her grown-up children, Junior and Princess Andre), close celebrity friends (I’m A Celebrity co-star Kerry Katona and former bridesmaid Michelle Heaton are both featured), famous exes (Gareth Gates and Dane Bowers both lift the lid on their respective relationships with Katie, as does her second husband, Alex Reid) and even her cosmetic surgeons get the opportunity to say their piece.

“People they’ve interviewed, even I have gone ’you’ve interviewed them?’,” the former glamour model and reality star admits with a gasp. “‘What? What did they say about me?’.”

Already renowned for her unfiltered approach to public life, she claims that the Katie we see in Nowhere To Hide is “a proper open book”, and “couldn’t be any more authentic and raw”, as she reflects on the creation of her media “empire”, “marriages”, “relationships” and “every up and down”.

The first two episodes deal mostly with her first decade in the public eye, as she rose from a page 3 favourite to dominating the front pages. Seemingly, no subject is off the table, whether she’s taking accountability for what went wrong in past relationships, reflecting on the public thrashing she received from the tabloid press (and, as a result, the British public) and discussing some of the darkest moments from her personal life.

One such incident discussed early on in the documentary comes when she reflects on being sexually assaulted as a young child by a stranger in a park, something she has previously claimed had a profound effect on her self-image.

In an opening scene of Nowhere To Hide, Katie looks back at childhood pictures of herself, as well as some of the magazine covers she appeared on during her glamour modelling days, describing the latter as “ugly”.

“What’s really sad… there’s a picture I hold up when I’m five, and when I’m seven,” she explains of this scene in the doc. “They’re the only pictures I look at and I think, ‘aw, I was a sweet-looking girl’. But then, something happened to me around then…”

“So I’ve tried to work out, why do I think that I’m so ugly? Because from then, I just think I’m ugly,” she shares. “And that probably explains why I always do surgery.”

“It’s weird, because I’ve been a model all these years, selling out magazines, calendars, being booked for this job and that job, but yet I never look in the mirror and think, ‘phwoar, she’s a sort’,” she adds, with the distinctive laugh viewers of her past reality shows or YouTube series will already know so well.

The most difficult part of making Nowhere To Hide, she says, came when she reflected on a past attempt to take her own life.

“That was the darkest moment. I mean, you can’t get any darker than that,” she notes, saying the documentary allowed her to look back on “the effect it had on my family, the people around me and, obviously, myself”.

Recent years have seen something of a reckoning over the way women in the public eye were treated in the media in the 1990s and 2000s’ tabloid culture, at a time when the private lives of stars including Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, as well as others who are no longer with us, like Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, were treated as a commodity.

Similarly, Nowhere To Hide offers us all a chance to look back at those early years when Katie Price (or Jordan, as he was still known to most of us) became an overnight tabloid fixture.

While she certainly doesn’t shy away from discussing enjoying the highs that came with that time of her life, there’s also no denying there were plenty of lows “and lots of dark moments” that came along with them. If nothing else, the documentary serves as a reminder of just how young Katie was when she first found herself being vilified by the media, as she transitioned from glamour model to media personality.

“When people watch this show, they will realise, I did actually start when I was 17,” Katie points out. “That is so young. I had no media training, and literally, overnight, I’m not joking, I had all the paps following me. Like, carnage.

“I had the media against me. Then the public turned against me – and I’m only a baby, having to deal with all of this.”

She continues: “You go back to your younger self – or even if you are young, the nights you go out, and you’ve gone clubbing with your friends, and got drunk. Imagine if a camera took pictures of your night, of you coming out of a nightclub, then that goes in a newspaper, so the whole UK can see it. And then, they write whatever they think with that picture.

“And it’s not just that day, because then the weekly mags, the following week, write about your night out. This is what I’ve had to deal with constantly – and grown up like. It does affect you. And it’s not normal, really, is it?

“I just became a product for people to just easily target, hate, make fun of, write crap about. And that’s all that I’ve been used to. And, really, that’s quite sad.”

“And it’s been constant, like that, till… the present time!” she adds.

For those tuning in to the doc, she promises equal measures of laughs and tears – “but what’s most important,” she says, “is that anyone from any walk of life will come away and think, ‘I didn’t know that about her’, or you might think ‘I feel really bad for what I thought she was’”. “You will see a different side,” she insists.

One surprising outcome of watching Nowhere To Hide back, Katie says, is the “closure” it’s given her over certain events from her past. Perhaps most notably, in episode two, she and singer Gareth Gates separately reflect on their brief fling in the early 2000s, something Katie observes that “everyone thought was, like, a one-night stand”, but both profess was more serious than many will have realised.

The documentary offers new information about their romance, which took place when Gareth had become an overnight sensation on Pop Idol at the age of 17, and Katie was in her early 20s.

“I’ve had to wait 25 years to get answers for things,” she admits, claiming that watching the documentary back felt like she was “reliving my life, but getting answers I never had at the time”. “It’s quite interesting,” she observes.

Throughout Nowhere To Hide, the constants in Katie’s life – including her beloved mum, Amy – offer their unfiltered opinions on everything from her public falls from grace, her infamous break-ups and the way she’s handled different aspects of her private and professional life.

Both Amy and the glamour photographer Jeany Savage, a mentor to Katie in those early years, profess that they didn’t agree – at least, at the time – with the way she chose to introduce her newborn son Harvey into the spotlight.

“They couldn’t understand why I would do photo-shoots and that with Harvey,” Katie says. “And I’m trying to explain to them, ‘if I don’t control it and put pictures out, then a paparazzi will just come and take pictures and make money from it’.”

She adds that while “they couldn’t get their heads around it” in those days, “now it all makes sense to them why I did it”, insisting she was “quite switched on, at a young age”.

Harvey is now 24 years old, with Katie standing by the decisions she made in her younger years.

“He’s my child, he’s an ambassador for Mencap, and I’m glad I did show everyone Harv,” she enthuses. “You know, I’m proud of him, he’s a credit to me. And just because he’s got his disabilities or complex needs, why should he be hidden away?

“He’s a great character, he’s my son, and I love him.”

“And the same with all my other kids,” she adds, referring to sons Junior and Jett and daughters Princess and Bunny. “They were all brought up on TV, and it hasn’t harmed them. They absolutely love it.”

As Katie mentions, tabloid gossip and public scrutiny is something that has gone hand-in-hand with her media career since she was first came onto the scene as Jordan.

“So, it got to a point where it’s like, ‘well, I suppose I’d better play the game, and do it back’,” she remembers of those early days. “But it never got better. It’s never got better.

“It’s literally one scandal after another scandal, and another one, and another one, and another one. Even till this day there is a scandal!”

“Why? Why me?” she ponders. “What did I ask for? I didn’t ask for peace in my life, but come on. A girl needs a break sometimes.”

As for her most recent tabloid scandals – which, this year alone, have included her recent whirlwind marriage to Dubai-based entrepreneur Lee Andrews and the bumps in the road they’ve faced since tying the knot – Katie acknowledges: “Even now, there’s scandal in my life. Yes, I know. But I’m doing no different to anyone else. Everyone else shares their life on social media, so why can’t I?”

“All the speculation about my life and what’s going on now, none of you have any idea,” she adds, teasing: “But if you watch the documentary, there’ll be a lot of things answered to things you always wanted to know.”

Despite the headlines and drama, the controversy and backlash, the court cases and lapses in judgement, the scandals and still-rampant scrutiny, Katie is adamant that she’d never “walk away from this industry”.

“I love being [in front of] the camera,” she enthuses. “I love doing my photo-shoots. I love filming. I love what I do! I’m a grown-arse woman, I’m 48, and it’s my choice what I do, and my decision.

“And I’m still driven, and it’s not the end of me yet. In fact, I will never give up, until I’m on my deathbed. And that’ll be the last quote. ‘Bye everyone!’.”

Katie Price: Nowhere To Hide arrives on Sky and Now on Wednesday 8 July.

• Mind, open Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm on 0300 123 3393.
• Samaritans offers a listening service which is open 24 hours a day, on 116 123 (UK and ROI – this number is FREE to call and will not appear on your phone bill).
• CALM (the Campaign Against Living Miserably) offer a helpline open 5pm-midnight, 365 days a year, on 0800 58 58 58, and a webchat service.
• The Mix is a free support service for people under 25. Call 0808 808 4994 or email help@themix.org.uk
• Rethink Mental Illness offers practical help through its advice line which can be reached on 0808 801 0525 (Monday to Friday 10am-4pm). More info can be found on rethink.org.
• Rape Crisis services for women and girls who have been raped or have experienced sexual violence – 0808 802 9999
• Survivors UK offers support for men and boys – 0203 598 3898