The emotional children of Katie Price have broken down in tears as they recalled how their mother’s drug use meant she was unable to look after them properly and left them feeling “lonely” and unloved.
Junior, 21, and Princess, 19, have grown up in the spotlight since their parents Katie and Peter Andre split up when they were very young. And they’ve also dealt with the fallout afterwards which saw Katie struggle to cope and at one stage turn to cocaine to try to deal with her problems.
Junior says: “I remember missing her so much. This one time in particular, I was in her bed waiting for her to come back, and I woke up probably 3:30am to some loud noises, and I see her come in the room, and I’ll never forget the look on her face, she was obviously on stuff, right?
“I could see it in her eyes, and I was.. it scared me, because I’ve never seen my mum look like that. She’s there, but she’s not there, you know.”
Junior and Princess Andre are in tears in the doc
Junior adds: “She wasn’t in the right headspace, she really wasn’t. And she wasn’t being a mum, she wasn’t being the mum that I knew from when I was a little boy.
“The amount of love she gave me was so immense that that’s what I missed so much. Mum was on drugs, and she could not look after us, and that is the reality of it. She couldn’t.
“And then I got fed up. I clocked on that this was a very unhealthy environment, and I needed to get out. I did leave. I think I was about 14 or 15, Thank God that my dad was stable, because that’s the house that I went to and gained my sanity back, you know.
“While I was wishing and hoping that my mum would come back and turn herself around. It made me feel like I wasn’t good enough, because she wasn’t fixing herself for me.”
His sister Princess says: “She’d give me a blanket, and she sprayed all her perfume on it, and that was like that was my, my attachment to Mum. So I remember after school I used to go home and just feel so like lonely in a way. I used to just cuddle to the blanket and just cry.”
Junior and Princess Andre speak on Sky Doc
She adds: “I stayed. I always wanted to be there for her, and I always wanted to show her that, like, she has me, she has us, but she didn’t understand that at the time, because she was so hooked up in her own problems.”
The pair, who break down in tears in the joint interview, also say they had to learn how to fend for themselves including making microwave meals and “looking after each other”. In a new Sky documentary series, Katie also is open herself about her drug use in the past. It came around decade after her split from husband Peter Andre in 2009, and coincided with a series of failed relationships including a troubled marriage to Kieran Hayler who she wed in 2013.
“It was the only thing that blocked everything out,” Katie says of drugs thinking back to the worst period of her life. It will take out that pain, it will take out any worry, it will take out the noise.”
She was regularly using cocaine and staying out late and not putting her family first. Looking back she says: “When I hear what the kids, how they saw it, it breaks my heart. But they were still always looked after, I still had people around me looking after them, like helping me.
“But that’s not good enough. Kids need their mum, kids need their mum’s love, their mum’s hugs, and I thought I was given that, but obviously I wasn’t. It must have been horrible for them, horrible for them, and I’m just sorry to them that I put them through that and thought I was doing the best I could with them, but what could I have done?
“I was unwell. I couldn’t even look after myself. I was more than rock bottom. I didn’t want to be. I wanted to die. I felt worthless, suicidal thoughts all the time.”
Katie is candid in four part series
After one night of taking drugs and drinking, she crashed her car whilst feeling suicidal in September 2021. At the crash scene before being taken to the hospital, and then a police station, she had told her mum she “wanted to be out of it”.
“I remember when they put me in a cell it was like peace. Peace and quiet. I found that quite comforting. It is quite sad to think that,” She recalls.
Thankfully she also credits six weeks in The Priory after this incident with saving her life and helping her to learn to look after herself in a better way. Her relationship with Junior and Princess has improved as a result.
The new documentary covers the whole 30 year career of Katie, beginning as a glamour model who at her peak could command six figure fees for photoshoots or appearances on shows like I’m A Celebrity, where she met Peter Andre in 2004.
But since then she has been made bankrupt and is less in-demand to be on TV.
She is currently married to Dubai businessman Lee Andrews and her family express their shock on screen at the fact she again married someone in January she had known for just weeks.
On the documentary her stepdad Paul Price recalls a conversation he had before her fourth marriage.
“I said what’s she going to Dubai for? ‘To see a bloke’. I said ‘what’s the catch?’ And then we find out she’s getting married. I said ‘you’re off your head’. And then the geezer is in the paper pretending to be a millionaire.”
Asked if he was angry with her, Paul replies: “100 percent”.
Son Junior adds: “This is the most silliest stupidest thing, marrying a guy she doesn’t even know. This is my mum, this is what she does.”
Her mum Amy Price ends the film with a simple dream that her daughter will fine happiness and less drama in her life at some stage as she gets older.
Amy says: “In some ways, she’s still like a child. But she’s a good daughter. I hope she really does find someone to love and be happy.”
