The transfiguration of Katie Price

Guy KellyMon, June 8, 2026 at 7:07 AM UTC

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From her early incarnation as the model Jordan (left, in 2001) to her life today as a one-woman soap opera, Katie Price has constantly reinvented herself in an effort to stay in the public eye

This time last year, when the weather was fair and the waters of her life ran relatively calm, Katie Price appeared as a guest on What's My Age Again?, a podcast hosted by the comedian Katherine Ryan.

The conceit of the show is simple: Ryan invites celebrity guests to talk about their childhood, their difficulties, their relationships and their health, then has them undergo a test that tells them their biological age, largely based on inflammation markers.

At the time, Price had a chronological age of 47. Sitting on a sofa in a pale yellow sweater and jeans, her espresso-dark hair in a loose ponytail, her teeth so brilliantly white they'd make a papal cassock look grubby, she didn't look unwell, exactly. Still, she surely feared the worst.

"Your biological age is…" Ryan said, opening an envelope as if she were presenting an Oscar, "… 70." Price looked aghast. "That's nuuuts," she said, eyes widening.

Ryan, who had just heard Price's outrageous, bewildering and often tragic life story, knitted her brow and said what we were all thinking. "But it's not really," she responded.

And it's not. This is a woman who has lived so many lives, and reconstructed herself so many times, that she's written eight memoirs – every one of them a bestseller. A woman who, at the age of 48, looks almost nothing like the girl of 18 who sent a photograph of herself to a modelling agency 30 years ago, hoping to make it on to Page 3. And if trauma creates inflammation, as the resident doctor on the podcast went on to claim, then Price must be riddled with it. We have all lived in the age of Katie Price. But at what cost?

Price with the comedian Katherine Ryan on an episode of Ryan's podcast What's My Age Again? last year

The boobs, the men, the kids, the "Mucky Mansion", the books, the horses, the surgeries, the braids, the TV shows, the outfits, the merch, the music, the cancers, the stunts, the feuds, the DVDs, the tattoos, the arrests…

You may have tried to tune out from much of it, but the life and times of Katie Price have provided near-constant background music to British celebrity culture this century. And if anybody thought that hegemony might be ending, it isn't: this month, a barely comprehensible saga involving the disappearance of Price's Dubai-based fourth husband, the "millionaire businessman" Lee Andrews, has given her more column inches than she's had in years.

To offer a précis, for life is short: after a rapid engagement – Price's eighth – the couple reportedly married in January. This came as a shock to Price's friends and fans, who were so unaware of Andrews' existence that they wondered whether he was a product of AI. But he was real, as verified by the women who emerged claiming he was a conman who'd scammed them in the past. Andrews has strongly denied these claims and they have not been proven in court.

Price also contradicted the claims, insisting she'd seen evidence of his self-made wealth, including the purchase of a property for $36m in cash, as well as his passport. "I'm not stupid," she said online.

With fourth husband Lee Andrews, whom Price reportedly married in January

Andrews was due to join her in Britain in May, but he never materialised, and instead fell silent for two weeks. His final texts to Price spoke of being "in [a] van" heading to a "black site". Had he been arrested? Had he been kidnapped? Had he run for the hills? Had he ever existed?

Price was distraught, as she emphasised in daily posts to her three million Instagram followers. One post featured a montage of photographs from her short marriage, over which she sang Brenda Russell's 1988 ballad Get Here. But Andrews did not get here. He did finally excavate himself last week, apparently having been arrested and detained in Dubai over what the authorities call a "private civil matter".

Price attempted to visit Andrews in Al Awir Central Prison, managing to speak to him on a phone and then giving an interview to The Sun. "I'm out here in Dubai, because I'm here to help Lee," she told the newspaper, adding: "This is real, this is real life; this is my life."

There have been suggestions that the entire escapade might have been a stunt. Price has enjoyed a lot of press attention. Michelle*, who has worked with Price on and off for more than 20 years, says she doesn't think Price is in on any possible stunt, "but if there's one thing she knows, it's how to make the most of a bad situation".

In a YouTube video shared on May 19, Price said: "I want to make it clear again, everyone, this is not a publicity stunt. This is real. And anyone who thinks that I'm part of this is disgusting. This isn't a game. This is real life. This is a serious situation for me."

When The Telegraph contacted Andrews for a statement, a familiar voice answered his phone. "It's his wife, Kate, queen of all media!" Price announced. Andrews, she said, had no comment on anything, but if we had any questions for her instead, we ought to send them via WhatsApp, as she was having a blow-dry. We did just that, but she has not responded.

Being the queen of media probably keeps her busy. At the time of writing, the Daily Mail alone has published 97 articles on Price in the last 20 days. The public has consumed it all with a blend of fascination, mirth, distrust and pity – just as they have for three decades. She's made the most of it, all right. "Never underestimate the Pricey," was always her catchphrase. Yet we still do.

0306 Katie Price’s family tree

Before there was Katie Price, there was Jordan. And before there was Jordan, there was Katrina Infield, the second child of Ray and Amy Infield, of Brighton, East Sussex. They divorced when Katie was four, with Ray all but disappearing. Her mother went on to marry builder Paul Price – a union which gave Katie and her elder brother, Daniel, a younger half-sister named Sophie.

For a while, her main passions were horses and swimming. She once declared that she thought about sex "every six seconds", but that takes on a different slant when you learn that she was sexually assaulted in a park at the age of seven, had indecent images of her taken by a photographer (and later convicted child abuser) at 13, and escaped being dragged into a car some time in between.

"Back to [my] childhood, my thing that's always been wrong in my life is men," she'd later say. "That's always been my trouble in my life."

Price posing as Jordan at her first test photoshoot in 1996, having joined the Samantha Bond agency - 2004 Stephen Mark Perry

A rebellious side had emerged by the time adolescence started. When her mother hid the keys to her car to stop her going out, Price would hotwire it. Soon afterwards she left school to train as a nurse, but grew frustrated by not being able to wear nail varnish, so sent some photographs to Samantha Bond, then the leading glamour model agency. Within a week of signing up, Price was shooting her first Page 3 photos for The Sun, aged 18. To protect her family, and to stand out, she took the suggestion of a model booker and adopted a mononym. "Jordan" was born.

Later she'd reflect on what motivated her to start posing topless in national newspapers for £120 a go. One theory holds that it was a trauma response: she was seeking to take back her sexuality from men who'd previously stolen it from her. "Sometimes I think, did I do the glamour modelling as a sign of 'Yeah, men, you can look at me but you can't have me…' I don't know," she said in 2017.

At the Formula One Spanish Grand Prix in 1998 - Marcus Brandt/Bongarts

With her bouncing curls and enormous green eyes, Price was beautiful, but she was also willing to do and say anything, instantly appreciating that in the nascent age of celebrities not necessarily requiring a skill or talent, she could drive up her value simply by being outrageous.

"She was impossible to ignore from the start," says Lucie Cave, the former editor of Heat magazine, who has known Price since the early Noughties. "What set her apart wasn't just the looks or the ambition, it was that she had no filter at a time when every other celebrity was carefully managed."

One way to stick out among other glamour models is to have bigger breasts. At 18, Price increased her natural 32B breasts to a 32C, then the following year to a 32D, then to a 32G. Inflating at that regularity did wonders for her career, but started a relationship with cosmetic surgery that seems closer to an addiction. As of today, she's had at least 17 breast enhancements, six facelifts and four "Brazilian butt-lifts", as well as rhinoplasties, liposuction and even "ear tweaks".

Friends and family have long felt concern about the constant renovation. In recent months, as Price has looked more brittle and unlike herself than ever, those worries have grown. "I think it's sad, when you see what she's done to her body and face. Those are not the actions of somebody who's happy," says Michelle. "I think she's dysmorphic, and has very low self-esteem. She was thrust into this life as a teenager and she'd been through abuse before then. So she's somebody who's very fragile, vulnerable and unhappy."

Price has had at least 17 breast enhancements, six facelifts and four 'Brazilian butt-lifts' - 2025 Nordin Catic

She didn't always attract concern. The Jordan of the early 2000s, who'd broken out of Page 3 to dominate the rest of the newspaper, too, appeared to love life, and earned riches from it.

"She was sharper than she let on," Cave recalls. "She was one of the first celebrities to do PAs [personal appearances] – monetising nightclub appearances before reality TV stars made it standard. And she absolutely rinsed it. She understood that getting close to her fans and getting paid for it weren't separate things.

"She was also the queen of the set-up shot. She knew that if magazines were going to run pictures of her, she might as well control which ones. But she always knew exactly what narrative she was delivering."

Price has been prone to rants about press intrusion, but she has been more than happy to let them intrude. Aaron Parfitt, a paparazzo based in Manchester, holds her with particular affection. "I think she's misunderstood. She can be a nightmare time-wise, she just turns up when she wants, always bloody late to everything, but she's genuinely nice. She wants to be loved, she just chooses all the wrong people," he says.

More than any celebrity he's ever put a flashbulb before, Price knows how to manipulate the paps. "She's a really clever person, she knows how to work the media and makes a fortune out of it, doing arranged paparazzi pictures. She rings [us] herself and says where she'll be."

With paparazzo Aaron Parfitt, who calls Price 'a really clever person [who] knows how to work the media and makes a fortune out of it' - Aaron Parfitt

In 2021, Price rang Parfitt's office when she'd split from her third husband, Kieran Hayler. "She was like, 'Right, I'm going to my friend's bar in Blackpool, I'll take the ring off, do all that kind of stuff, get me there.' And she made a fortune out of it. It'll be five figures and she'll take 60, 70, sometimes 80 per cent."

Occasionally 80 per cent isn't enough, he adds. In recent years, Price has taken to handing her phone to a friend, who takes "pap-style" shots of her, then sends them directly to newspaper picture desks herself. "I know before she's made 20 grand off pictures she's done herself," Parfitt says.

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Before she realised that the dramas of her personal life were enough to keep people interested, Price did a good line in stunts. One involved attempting to become the MP for Stretford and Urmston, in Greater Manchester, in the 2001 general election. Running as an independent under the slogan "For a bigger and betta future", the 23-year-old's manifesto included pledges of free plastic surgery for all, tax cuts for people who had affairs with foreign footballers, free package holidays and no parking tickets.

She came fourth, winning 713 votes, which was respectable, given that the Liberal Democrat candidate only managed 3,178. It isn't known whether one of those votes came from the Manchester United striker Dwight Yorke. After relationships with the singer Dane Bowers and Ace, a star of Gladiators, and taking the virginity of singer Gareth Gates, she fell pregnant after a short, sharp fling with Yorke and gave birth to her first child, a son called Harvey.

Harvey was found to be blind with septo-optic dysplasia, and was also diagnosed with Prader-Willi syndrome, symptoms of which mean he is autistic, diabetic and overweight.

While Yorke disappeared, having initially refused to believe Harvey was his, Price simply got on with it alone, even when she was diagnosed with a rare cancer in her finger shortly after his birth.

"I don't want sympathy," she insisted in an interview in 2002. "I'm strong and I'm good at dealing with things. There's far worse-off people than me. My son's blind – whatever, he doesn't know any different. Life would be boring if we were all the same. Is that the wrong attitude to have? Anyway, women are all on my side now: since they found out about Harvey and me having the old cancer b------s…"

That can-do attitude to Harvey, who is now 24, has never wavered. Whenever he's been seen in public, Price has been by his side. She has taken him on television, on tour, written a book about caring for him, and made a documentary about the relentless online abuse he's received – even lobbying Parliament for a change in the laws around the latter.

Price with her son Harvey, who is blind and has the genetic disorder Prader-Willi syndrome - Lorne Campbell/Guzelian

"The way she's coped with his disability, being his biggest advocate, has been really inspiring," Michelle says. "She's never moaned, never complained about her lot, and she would have every right to because life with him has been difficult. But she's brave, and that shows in the way she's brought Harvey up."

Motherhood did little to temper her ambitions. By 2004 Price had been on the cover of every magazine she had hoped for, including Playboy, so television executives called, including the producers of I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, which was then preparing for its third series.

At the time, Price was the highest-paid contestant in the show's history, but ITV soon earned it back in viewing figures, especially as a romance blossomed with the then-faded Australian pop star Peter Andre. They flirted, they canoodled, and within 12 months Price was in a puffy, pink dress, crunching along the gravel driveway of Berkshire's Highclere Castle in a Cinderella glass carriage pulled by six white horses.

Photographs of their wedding were sold to OK! magazine for a reported £1.75m and their four-year marriage was certainly productive. In addition to two children – Junior Savva Andreas, now 20, and Princess Tiaamii Crystal Esther, now 18 – they also made a duets album and nine series of ITV's fly-on-the-wall documentary Katie & Peter.

With future husband Peter Andre on the ITV reality show I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, in 2004

Having previously been an abrasive character, Price's PR strategy – or rather, the strategy suggested for her by Claire Powell, Andre's manager, who took over managing Price – in this era was to "soften" her image. The public already knew her story thanks to her 2004 memoir Being Jordan, which sold a record number of copies for an autobiography in its opening week, WH Smith reported. But she was now reintroduced as a multi-hyphenate, family-friendly wife, mother and entrepreneur.

"She has had some very good managers at points, and some very bad managers and bad advice," says Chad Teixeira, a PR expert who has worked with Price in the past. "When she and Pete got married, the PR buzz around that was amazing. At the time Powell took her on and did an amazing job."

The "Peter and Katie" era was remarkable, Cave says. "When it ended you could see her heartbreak happen in real time. I'm not sure she's ever really recovered from it."

Price and Andre split up in 2009, shortly after she'd appeared on I'm A Celebrity for a second time, earning £450,000 to appear for nine days. There followed a litany of increasingly dreadful men, the kind Gen Z call "walking red flags". Nine months after finishing with Andre, she married Alex Reid, a mixed martial arts fighter who enjoyed cross-dressing.

They lasted two years, before Price met Hayler, who was then a stripper. They married in the Bahamas two months later. In 2014, Price claimed she had caught him having an affair with her best friend of 25 years.

Third husband Kieran Hayler, whom Price claims to have caught cheating with her best friend - Eddie Mulholland for The Telegraph

In October this year, she will be called as a witness when Hayler stands trial accused of raping a 13-year-old girl at their marital home, "Mucky Mansion" in West Sussex, in 2016. He has denied the allegation. The alleged victim is not a member of Price or Hayler's extended families.

This was Price's lowest ebb. On stage with the media personality Kerry Katona last year, she detailed a suicide attempt she made after the breakdown of her marriage to Hayler, which coincided with the declaration of her first bankruptcy in 2019. Her debts were listed as totalling more than £3.5m. Around this time, she entered The Priory for treatment for alcohol and cocaine addiction, and received a formal diagnosis of ADHD and PTSD.

Legal issues have plagued her since. In 2021 she received a 16-week suspended sentence after flipping her car while under the influence of alcohol and cocaine. A year later she escaped a prison term after breaching a restraining order forbidding her from contacting Hayler.

In 2024 she was declared bankrupt again, and arrested for failing to show up at a court hearing. In her defence, she'd been in Turkey, having a facelift. Two months ago, Price was banned from driving for a seventh time after failing to respond to police correspondence about a speeding offence.

To those who know her, the financial woes are a puzzle. Parfitt cannot accept that Price could be broke, as she's "making money all the bloody time". Michelle believes her net worth has always been radically inflated, but exactly how she's lost it all has never been obvious.

"I remember bringing it up once, but she's got a way of bamboozling you in an interview and just steering you off track, dropping a bombshell that diverts your attention elsewhere," she says. The journalist Lynn Barber once wrote that, "You don't so much interview Katie Price as occasionally interrupt her."

There is no questioning her ability to make money. As well as modelling, singing and reality TV appearances, she's released 11 romantic novels, two children's book series and a fashion title. She's done fitness DVDs, released perfumes, had a line of make-up, designed clothing ranges, endorsed nutritional supplements and been an actress, including in Sharknado 5 and upcoming revenge thriller Jackie the Stripper.

The famous Mucky Mansion in West Sussex, which Price sold in 2024 - Television Stills

Four years ago, she joined OnlyFans, charging users £12 per month for access to private pictures of her. The venture wasn't particularly successful, though that's perhaps unsurprising: there was very little she'd not revealed before. Instead, social media, podcasting and promoting CBD oil appear to provide the bulk of her income these days. As far as friends know, she mostly advises herself.

Many pundits, Cave included, believe Price should be saluted for her entrepreneurial spirit, as a one-woman brand who created an industry around herself and her personal dramas long before the Kardashians. "We should say it more loudly. She was doing everything [they] get credited for inventing, but years earlier, with far less infrastructure, in a much more hostile media environment," Cave says.

"No social media to control her own narrative, just tabloids and lads mags – who weren't really on her side. She built a business empire despite this. But the fact she doesn't get the same cultural credit says more about how the British media treated her than it does about what she actually achieved."

Recent years have been no less eventful. Two engagements, to fitness trainer Kristopher Boyson and the car salesman Carl Woods, were broken off. IVF treatment with the latter, which was captured in yet another reality series, failed. A relationship with Married at First Sight contestant JJ Slater looked promising, until it wasn't.

And then came Andrews. He's alive, of course, at least until she gets her hands on him. "He is going to have to explain it all. He needs to do an interview," Price said last week, before setting off from her rented home in West Sussex (she sold the mansion in 2024) to extricate him from the Middle East.

A new four-part documentary series, Katie Price: Nothing to Hide, made by Louis Theroux's production company Mindhouse, will air on Sky next month. She will appear, looking back on a story that is very much still unravelling.

Price at the Cambridge Union in May 2025. 'She's been so present in everyone's lives for so long that people feel genuinely protective, even if they don't quite admit it,' says Lucie Cave - 2025 Nordin Catic

How it ends is anybody's guess. Everybody I spoke to for this story had different views, but none could say they didn't like her. "There's a car-crash quality to how people watch her now – a kind of worried fascination rather than pure entertainment," Cave says.

"Nobody actually wants it to go wrong but they fear it will. She's been so present in everyone's lives for so long that people feel genuinely protective, even if they don't quite admit it. I don't think it's a sad story though. It's a story about what happens when you're completely honest in public for 25 years in a culture that rewards performance over authenticity."

Michelle would love it if Price met somebody and "they lived happily ever after". On the other hand, "I'm not even sure if she wants that, because she thrives on the drama of it all. She enjoys it, to an extent. I don't think she's cut out for the quiet life."

To look at Price now is to see a confection, a palimpsest: the layers of her many reinventions, her endless traumas, all faintly visible beneath that hard shell. She once said that she would like to be remembered "as the girl who did everything".

The good news, the doctor on What's My Age Again? told her, is that inflammation is reversible, and biological age can be reduced with sensible changes. At this, Price squealed with relief. "I have changed a lot." That was last year. As has always been the case with Katie Price, and perhaps always will be, we wanted to believe her.

*Name has been changed.

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”