Kerry Katona, 42, let rip about the “double standards” in the industry, saying that as a female, she feels her mistakes are forgiven less easily and remembered more vividly. The furious former Atomic Kitten singer, who has since become a TV personality, said she felt sympathy for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! host Ant McPartlin over his past issues, but challenged the way she has been treated in comparison.
The troubled star is soon set to join comedian Alison Spittle in co-presenting the BBC Sounds podcast Wheel of Misfortune, where celebrities will be invited to share the “bleakest” moments of their lives.
However, she argues that she hasn’t received much sensitivity from the public when it comes to her own bleak moments in time.
“Ant had his own issues [and] when he crashed his car [back in 2018] it was a big, big story – yet eight months later he’s winning awards and it’s all forgotten about,” Kerry raged.
“How many years later, from my This Morning interview where I was accused of being drunk on air, and we’re still talking about it?” she challenged.
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Kerry has made it clear that she “applauds” Ant’s efforts to recover after battling prescription drug and alcohol addiction.
He pled guilty to drink driving after the crash and made a comeback with his TV partner Dec Donnelly, yet Kerry feels she is still “ridiculed” over the aforementioned interview on ITV’s This Morning.
Her slurred words led members of the public to take to the internet to accuse her of being drunk or on drugs – and those are accusations that she thinks have stuck to her ever since.
“My speech was really slurred due to my bipolar medication,” she insisted as she continued her chat with Greatest Hits Radio host Jackie Brambles.
After his traumatic crash in March 2018, which had led to the hospitalisation of a four-year-old child, he pleaded guilty to drink driving and was open about his struggles to quit prescription medication.
It was announced that he had been twice the drink-drive limit at the time, and he was fined £86,000 and slapped with a 20-month driving ban.
He was replaced by Holly Willoughby in the jungle that year while he attended rehab, but he then returned to TV the following year and made a successful comeback.
He apologised at the time for “letting a lot of people down”, saying in his official statement that he felt “mortified” and “ashamed”.
Meanwhile, Kerry – who says she first took drugs at the age of 14 – has revealed that at the height of her addiction, she had a near-death experience, twice.
“The amount of coke I was once doing, I literally died,” she previously told New! magazine.
“I’d stopped breathing [but] I remember coming back with these beautiful figures around me and I felt so much love – that happened to me twice.
“[That’s how] I know I have angels looking out for me.”
She added insistently: “You can knock me down but you can’t keep me down.”
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