Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | August 20, 2024
Last week, the British former glamour model, reality TV star, and businesswoman Katie Price was arrested at Heathrow Airport for failing to attend a court appearance. An arrest warrant was issued for Price at the end of July after she failed to turn up in court for a hearing relating to her bankruptcy status. When she was arrested, photos emerged of her with bandages around her face following a trip to Türkiye for another round of cosmetic surgery. After the hearing, she returned to Türkiye for a family holiday, but the trip was mired in controversy regarding her expenses but also a rather unexpected viral photo. On social media, a picture went upsettingly viral showing a nude woman who appeared to be Price with faeces on her stomach.
Katie Price is a distinctly British celebrity, a woman who paved the way for the current reality TV model of fame that has birthed many a Love Island influencer but also stands tall as the ultimate cautionary tale of mismanagement, misogyny, and straight-up stupidity. It’s a story of tragic camp, a blend of hot pink, Donatella-levels of fake tan, silicone, horse poop, weddings, divorces, disability rights, sex work, and shame. And you thought the Vanderpump Rules people were a lot.
It’s easy to forget just how famous Price was for a long time. Under the name Jordan, Price became a topless model, emerging as one of the most prominent faces in the field via Page 3, a section of The Sun that featured young and pretty women with their boobs out. Much was made about the fact that she’d had at least three breast enhancement surgeries, and her increased assets were endlessly photographed. This was the era of the lad’s mag, a seedy kind of male-focused endeavour that reveled in the gobby faux-working class sexism of the ’90s, and it was considered good business to gawk at women with their clothes off and make bad-taste jokes about them at the same time.
What set Jordan/Price apart was her savvy. She parlayed Page 3 appearances into TV gigs, a workout DVD, and a slew of business deals. She had her own perfume and nutritional supplements. Her love of horses gave way to an equestrian range. She released million selling books that she openly admitted she had no hand in writing (her 2007 novel, Crystal, sold more copies than every title on that year’s Booker Prize shortlist combined.) After appearing on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, she coupled up with fellow contestant Peter Andre and they became the reality love fest of the decade. Price was candid, often to a fault, happy to discuss the nitty-gritty of her job, her boobs, and making money in a business where she was meant to stay silent. She seemed both relatable and utterly out-there, the face of the girl who Made It.
In 2002, she gave birth to her first son, Harvey, who was born with a variety of health issues. The father, footballer Dwight Yorke, wanted nothing to do with the pair and Price spent the next two decades fighting for her disabled son. She campaigned to make online abuse a criminal offence, largely driven by the harassment he has faced, and has spoken out frequently on how little support there is for disabled people and their caregivers.
There was a point where it seemed like everything Price touched turned to gold, but it didn’t last long. Price’s personal life was part of her brand, and when that got messy, so did her cashflow. She divorced Andre, then married MMA fighter Alex Reid, which lasted about a year. Her third marriage lasted, on and off, about five years. She couldn’t stop getting in trouble for driving offences, whether it was drunk driving or driving without a licence. She revealed that in 2018 she’d been raped at gunpoint and developed PTSD as a result. That same year, she was first declared bankrupt, then again at the beginning og 2024. She was evicted from her home for failing to pay her mortgage. There were piles of rubbish and abandoned cars left on the grounds of what was nicknamed Mucky Mansion. Contract cleaners were brought in to clear away the piles of rubbish and animal faeces. Every time she appeared on a talk show, her list of problems seemed to increase, to the point where it became a meme. It was solid for business, at least for a celebrity whose primary source of income is selling her life to the masses for consumption and scorn.
There was always a sense of judgment in the way that Price was viewed. Her career started in topless modelling and reality content and hasn’t moved much beyond that. She now has an OnlyFans rather than lads mag photoshoots, where she offered naked shower videos for around £50. It’s notable, however, how much of Price’s business focus was on appealing to other women. The hot pink workout stuff wasn’t for dudes. It wasn’t uncommon for me to hear women like those in my family say some variation of, ‘well, I don’t like the Page 3 stuff but I love how she’s worked hard and made a name for herself.’ A mouthy working-class woman who made millions despite being consistently underestimated or derided as a dumb blonde was something worth rooting for, at least on paper. Documentaries, where she detailed raising her eldest son and the difficulties of parenting a disabled child, revealed her to be a ferociously devoted mother dealing with a broken system that even the wealthy struggle to overcome.
Price did all the stuff that you’re supposed to do to remain famous in Britain, and she never stopped being open to a viciously cruel tabloid press that makes its money from turning people (usually marginalized ones) into punching bags. If she thought that this would soften the blows when the tide turned against her then she was sorely mistaken because there’s always more profit in hating women than defending them. For a lot of women, it’s hard to defend Price. After all, she got famous by helping to mould yet another impossible beauty standard, and all for a newspaper that couldn’t say a kind word about women if their existence depended on it. One way she made her living was by blabbing to the papers about the famous men she’d had sex with, something that now seems horribly invasive and needlessly cruel.
Keeping up with the impossible standards of beauty she set for herself has been tough for Price. She’s now on her sixth facelift and 17th boob job. She looks far older than her 46 years. Once the tabloid fetish for augmentation, she now seems like a warning for its dangers. Her documented recoveries and painful side effects, at the very least, offer a necessary balance to the filtered perfection of the era of Instagram Face. Often, it feels like Price is the only one who’s honest about how much it sucks to do this to yourself over and over again, but not enough for her to actually stop.
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.’ This is the inevitable way of things when your living is entirely rooted in your personal pain. Everything is content. Price is the proto-influencer, the half-camp, half-complicit cog in the machine who thought she could beat the system if she stayed in control of the story. But nobody can retain their grasp forever, especially not those who are trying to beat the tabloids at their own game. The more she tries to lean into her exaggerated persona, the more she risks the backlash. People are not on her side now, not after all the dangerous driving convictions and blowing of her money and general sense that she squandered it all for no reason. Being a sex worker just makes it easier for those who already dismissed her to laugh in her face harder.
Reality TV is built on messes, on creating augmented versions of the truth that can be packaged into sellable tropes. But you can’t reveal too much, lest your audiences find that what’s behind the curtain is too much to stomach. That might be Price’s biggest failing as a celebrity when it comes to her brand: it was always built on her showing everything, literally and figuratively, and promising that there was more to come. When it gets too real, people tend to be uneasy with the unvarnished truth. If Katie Price is to ever make yet another comeback - and I wouldn’t write her off because she’s determined to stick around - then it may rely on her pulling back from her old ways. I wonder if she’s capable of it.
