Contents
Title Page
1 End of a Dream
2 Ibiza Rocks!
3 The Heat is On
4 Camp Katie
5 Katie and Alex
6 The Detonator
7 An Affair to Remember
8 A War of Words
9 Cage-fighting Man
10 ‘I Was Raped’
11 Fighting Back
12 Who Was It?
13 Katie’s Men
14 A Lady Called Roxanne
15 It’s Over
Copyright
The end, when it came, was brutal. On 8 September 2009, at the High Court in London, divorce proceedings were under way. District Judge Bradley was working his way through a list of 21: second to last were the names of a couple who were cross-petitioning each other for a divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour, under the names Price K v Andrea PJ – Peter Andre’s real name.
The names were read out, Judge Bradley pronounced decree nisi and said that the papers involved would not be made public as Peter’s lawyers had made an application to keep them private until a full hearing into whether they should be made public. The whole proceedings took just over a minute: Katie Price and Peter Andre were divorced. Their marriage had lasted just three years.
And so it was over for Britain’s most famous couple. But just what had gone wrong? After Pete’s shock decision to walk out on Katie the previous May, the couple had been increasingly at loggerheads, but matters escalated in previous weeks. Any chance that the duo might have had of keeping matters civilised had evaporated months previously, with a fierce war of words from the outset. All sorts of rumours swirled around as to the cause of the split and these were to intensify over the coming months as the two fought a public-relations battle to win the greatest support and neither seemed inclined to keep things amicable. In her hurt and rage, Katie lashed out at Pete and, while he attempted to keep cool, often he was provoked beyond endurance and so, in turn, lashed out himself. Matters did not improve when, over time, Katie was to form another relationship, while her ex-boyfriend Dwight Yorke also got roped into the mix. At times, it seemed, this was war.
The first really public battle was about who had been unfaithful to whom, although, if truth be told, it was probably neither of them. The marriage fell apart for very different reasons, but both had admitted to being jealous where the other was concerned, Katie had allowed herself to be photographed with other men and anyway, no one could quite believe that two such sought-after people would split up without anyone else being involved.
Pete, in particular, was incensed by any accusation that he had cheated on his famous wife. Back in early June, shortly after the decision to split was announced, he was adamant that he had been a good husband from the start. ‘I never once strayed from Kate,’ he told friends. ‘I was brought up to believe marriage was for life and this goes against everything my family and I stand for. Kate and I had our troubles like any other couple, but I never gave up until the very, very end. I would never walk away from the marriage without thinking about it long and hard; I didn’t just up and fly the nest. I believe marriage is for life and this has left me utterly devastated.’
It had, too, but then Katie was clearly badly affected as well. Right from the start, she put on a much tougher show than Peter, but a dramatic weight loss when she appeared on the Clothes Show Live in late May clearly illustrated that she was taking it much harder than she let on. Neither of them appeared able to talk to the other, however, with the result that both were clearly knocked for six about it all.
Katie continued to put a brave face on it, but her actions told a different story. She was partying hard, often causing chaos wherever she turned up. The reality was that she was indulging in extreme behaviour to try to forget all her troubles, but, still, it didn’t look good. A case in point was a Boyzone concert at Wembley Arena, during which she seemed totally out of control.
‘Jordan was an absolute car crash – it was really sad and quite disturbing to see her in that state,’ said one observer. ‘She had been drinking before and during the show. Then, when it got to the big finale, where the band are raised up over the crowd on cables, she stumbled into the sound mixing table and spilled her drink all over it. The band’s microphones cut out and the earpieces they wear to receive instructions from the show director started malfunctioning and making a really high-pitched screeching noise in their ears.
‘They had to pull them out – it was an absolute disaster, but Jordan carried on laughing and dancing around with her mates. Many of the fans in that area could clearly see what she was getting up to and, by the end of the gig, there was more people pointing at her than at the band. They looked amazed that she was behaving like that in full view of so many people. It was just sad to see her like that. She’s clearly very emotional and taking the split very badly … It’s a shame to see her like that.’
It was easy to mock, not least because Katie had spent much of her twenties falling out of nightclubs with a new man on her arm, but this time her behaviour seemed to signal a kind of desperation. When people are very hurt, they resort to extreme behaviour, including getting drunk in an effort to forget about their woes, and, clearly, this was what was happening here. Katie wasn’t happy: she was having a horrible time and doing whatever she could to numb the pain.
Other people recognised that, too. Boyzone’s Mikey Graham spoke for the rest of the band: ‘We’re obviously concerned for her and hope she gets through whatever troubles she has at the minute,’ he said. ‘We had no idea she was coming to the gig until she turned up just after it started.’
In many ways, it would have been better for her had she just admitted how hurt she felt and simply hid away, but that wasn’t Katie – her style was to get out there and show she was fighting, which is exactly what she did. It was Pete who admitted he was finding it very hard; even though he had left her, rather than vice versa, the couple had been married, after all, and had two children between them, Junior Savva Andreas and Princess Tiaamii Crystal Esther, as well as Katie’s son with footballer Dwight Yorke, Harvey, whom Pete treated as his own. In fact, the children grew to be as much a focus for fighting as anything else, with everything from the amount of time Pete got to spend with them to the appropriateness of introducing them to their parents’ new partners becoming a focal point of debate.
Pete, in particular, was emphatic that the children should not see their parents with other people while they were still legally married and was furious when his estranged wife soon began to take a different tack. He also continued to react angrily, when asked if he was seeing someone else. The answer was a firm ‘no’.
‘I can confirm the story in one magazine saying I’d grown close to three other women was total lies,’ he said. ‘Apparently, I’ve got one woman in Cyprus, another in Los Angeles and I’m involved with a member of staff. I can hold my head up high and say I’ve been 100 per cent faithful throughout my marriage, and still am. Any reports suggesting otherwise are hurtful and false.’
It was a stance he was to maintain, not least out of respect for his children, clearly concerned about the trio seeing new partners move too quickly into their parents’ lives.
Even at this early stage, several themes were beginning to emerge that would play out over and over again as the divorce began to roll through. The first was the PR battle between the two