Who is Kerry Katona? Girl band, you think, and you’re right. She was in Atomic Kitten. You’ll recognise her Nineties hits. She’s the gorgeous, smiling blonde one with the brown eyes who married Westlife’s Brian McFadden and had a No 1 with Whole Again. Then what else do you remember? Cocaine, addictions, divorces, bankruptcies, boob jobs, reconstructed nose, maybe. First Queen of the Jungle, Celebrity Big Brother, reality TV regular, friend of Katie Price, former face of Iceland, the frozen food store — and now OnlyFans star.
A lime-green Lamborghini is parked on the gravel outside her house in Cheshire. Inside, the Christmas decorations are still up around the vast flatscreen TV and her three youngest (of five) children aged between 11 and 18 are at home, polite, helpful and chatty, a credit to her parenting skills, offering to make tea.
“My children talk differently from me,” Katona says, having a quick vape and hamming up her northern accent. “They don’t swear, or I get mad. I’m strict. I tell them, ‘Do as I say, not as I’ve done. Learn from my mistakes.’ They went to private schools. They are massively middle class: my daughter Heidi has just been skiing. Me, I’m still definitely not.”
In Atomic Kitten with Natasha Hamilton, left, and Liz McClarnon, 2000
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Katona is constantly joking about her rollercoaster life. “I’ve been trash, car crash, hot mess, villain,” she says, laughing. When the photographer asks to take a picture in the snow, she replies, “I’m not sure about being surrounded by white powder.” Then she warns me about having too much breast surgery. “I’ve had my tits done and my nose fixed as I had a hole in it. I’ve had Botox. I don’t want much more. The last implants started slipping while I was having sex, Alice.” Good to know.
But when she talks about her childhood, calmly and with no trace of self-pity, I gasp. The make-up artist cries. Katona shows me the tattoos all over her body. “I’m covered in them. They’ve all got meaning,” she says. “This one is for inner strength. There’s being a mother, my moral compass, my angel. I have a phoenix on my back rising from the ashes. I should have died many times. Sometimes I used to wish I had. Now I feel blessed to have reached 45.”
• My life in a girl band: ‘I was screaming in my hotel room’
It is the ones on the inside of her wrists that are most poignant. “One of my first memories is watching my mum slit her wrists when I was three,” she says. “I had my older two daughters’ names [Molly and Lilly-Sue] tattooed there so if I ever got to that point, I would see them and stop.”
And suddenly she is talking about a terrified young girl from Warrington who had to pull a knife from her mother’s thigh, who lived off stale ketchup sandwiches and moved her meagre possessions 70 times from crack dens to police protection, refuges and foster homes as her alcoholic, drug-addicted parent escaped abusive partners. This was all before she was 18, when she was discovered and thrust onto the stage and into the limelight.
On Big Brother in 2011
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‘I’m portrayed as this national humiliation’
“Sit wherever you want to, my lovely,” she says, moving the laundry, two pugs and two sausage dogs off the sofa. “My housekeeper hasn’t been here for weeks. She’s got an abscess. I’m doing it all myself. Christmas was two adults, seven kids, four dogs and a partridge in a pear tree. Not exactly a holiday, but I loved it.”
She seems content finally with Paolo Margaglione, a personal trainer and businessman she met on a reality TV dating show, who has two young daughters. “To be honest, I’ve been in a really good place for the past decade, but the way I’m portrayed is as this fallen woman, this national humiliation.” She could have been, but she’s not.
Atomic Kitten was one of the first girl bands created when aspirational young wannabe teenagers in the Nineties were paraded in crop tops and platform trainers and treated appallingly by an irresponsible pop industry looking for the next hit. Watching the recent BBC documentary Girlbands Forever, I feel we are the ones who should be embarrassed, I tell her.
“Yes, it was vile,” she says. “We were so young, easy prey. We worked 24/7, but if we made a mistake we weren’t forgiven. It was brutal, out of control. The cameras up the skirts, 40 paparazzi outside my home 24 hours a day. It got to the stage when I thought, this will only be over when they get the headline ‘Kerry Katona dead’. It nearly happened. Fame is an abusive drug. I became addicted to being in the press. If they tried it today, I’d say, ‘Come for me and watch me roar.’ ”
With her first husband, Brian McFadden, 2002. “I thought he was my ‘for ever’. Then he slept with a stripper”
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Katona first had the idea of doing OnlyFans, a subscription-based online platform where creators share exclusive — often intimate — content, during the pandemic when all her other work doing reality TV shows, pantomimes and live acts had dried up. “Everything was cancelled,” she says. “I was panicking. How could I pay the rent and the bills with five kids? Then someone mentioned OnlyFans. I started off as a glamour girl, a page 3 model. I wasn’t going to be a f***ing rocket scientist. I had no chance of that with my childhood.”
What did she learn as a child? “The only thing my mother taught me was how to headbutt,” Katona says, bluntly. “And how to look after myself and to survive. I took my children back to where I was brought up recently and they said, ‘We’re not getting out of the car.’ But I had a great set of tits and a lovely smile. That was my get-out and still is.”
So, she asked her children, “ ‘How would you feel if I do a bit of glamour modelling again, just to get us through this?’ They were fine and with OnlyFans you can be in control and they only take 20 per cent.”
She’s never tried to hide anything from her children, she says. “We’re an open family. My kids tell me everything too, even my son. I am their mum. I want to be there for them and guide them.”
At home, January 2026. “I was hounded night and day until I did almost go mad”
JUDE EDGINTON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: ASHLEY PARKIN (@MAKEUPBYASHLEYUK/INSTAGRAM)
‘I first did drugs at 14. My mum told me it was sherbet’
Yet some of her time as an Atomic Kitten looked like fun. “Of course, there were bits of the Nineties I miss. We still sing the songs in the car. I have this nostalgia for when pop stars were pop stars, getting real fan mail, performing on the stage, the clothes, the clubs, the music. It was special. To think I was this kid who was in foster homes, doing drugs with her mum as a teenager, watching her get beaten up, suddenly having been a part of something that big, successful and British.”
But it was also exploitative of vulnerable young women. “I was hounded night and day until I did almost go mad. It was the most horrific, suicidal time, one of my darkest times. I was so naive, but there were also amazing highs. I am still proud to have been part of it and got through it, if that makes sense, this council estate kid making pop history.”
At first drugs weren’t a problem, she says. “I’d already done them at 14. My mum told me this powder was sherbet. It was speed. I had a great day. It was awesome, so I started to save my pocket money from my foster parents to buy coke. I didn’t really know any better, but when I got in the band I cleaned up. It was only when I’d go home that I didn’t want to look stuck up and I’d start again.”
She was never offered therapy in the band or advice, although later she was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, and with bipolar disorder, like her mother. “When I was 19 the doctors put me on antidepressants. I was blamed for not being able to cope with the pressure. We worked so hard. We didn’t have days off. We were paid £350 a week. All I wanted to do was be on the stage. I just wasn’t prepared for what came with it.”
In 2025, vaping by her Lamborghini
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Watching her mother slash her wrists was her second memory, she says. “I’ll never repeat my very first memory, that’s how bad it was. She did that up until I was 17. She had a Stanley knife and would threaten to cut herself. My mum used to have a baking tray in the oven that was full of lines. She fed me cigarettes. She’d had an even worse childhood than mine. She was left in an alley when she was six weeks old. Her mum was a prostitute. She was put in a kids’ home with four of her siblings before being fostered. I think as much as she wanted to be a good mum, she didn’t stand a chance. She was 20 when she had me. She was sectioned sometimes and I’d visit her in hospital.”
What people don’t understand, Katona says, is that however badly her mother behaved, she was still her universe. “I didn’t live with her much — her relationships were too explosive — but she had such control over me. I’d be with my foster parents and she’d ring from a phone box, saying, ‘I’m naked and I’ve been beaten up.’ I would give her my pocket money. I still love my mum, but she’s draining. She gravitates towards misery.”
In response, Katona says she was determined to be positive. “I was funny, quick-witted, pretty. I was the entertainer. I moved schools so much I learnt to make people laugh, so I was never bullied or a mean girl, but I was popular.”
‘This guy would beat my mum up, knife her’
And school was an escape of sorts. “My mum would go out on these benders. She was hard as nails. She’d throw an ashtray. She’d start a fight. She was always in the pub, so when I was young, I thought I’d grow up to be a barmaid.” Katona learnt to shop and cook and shoplift. “I skipped classes to look after her, although I resented it. I’ll never forget my mum came home really drunk one evening and she told me to make her one of those steak and ale pies in a tin, with chips, then she threw it everywhere.”
It was the abusive relationships that nearly destroyed them both. “This guy David would beat my mum up, knife her, hold a shotgun to her head, make her crawl. I hated him. I remember on my 13th birthday her saying she’d go back to Dave. That’s when I thought I couldn’t do it any more. A lovely police lady calmed me down, took a shine to me and put me with emergency foster parents. I went through a series of foster homes. The best had rules. I had to do my homework. There was food in the fridge. It was great. But then my mum would come back.”
Atomic Kitten at the Smash Hits poll winners’ party in London, December 2000
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It’s easy to see why Katona became convinced her looks were her way out. She shows me a picture of herself at 16, a stunning schoolgirl in her uniform, and another of her teenage breasts. “I was obsessed with my tits from nine. They looked so fake and false, they were perfect.” They had so little money that they sold her parrot, Alfie, for £20 so Katona could buy some Tampax. So her mum signed her up to a glamour agency. “The photographer did that thing, ‘Take your top off,’ and it started from there. No one stepped in and said it wasn’t right. But you know, be your own hero. I had only myself. I just thought, I have to make this work.”
When Katona, who loved singing, saw they were looking for a new girl band, she took her page 3 pictures to the audition. “I’ll never forget the phone call, when we were told we’d got the record deal and were signed.” The two other girls, Natasha Hamilton and Liz McClarnon, rang their parents, who were thrilled. “I rang my mum. She was so pissed she didn’t recognise me. But I thought, if I become famous, if I make loads of money and buy my mum a house, she will love me and it will fix everything.”
She also sought a father figure. “Of course I did. I have had five serious relationships in 30 years.” She was 18 when she met her first husband, Brian McFadden from Westlife, and they had the fairytale OK! wedding. “I thought he was my ‘for ever’. We were puppies, babies, back then. I wanted him to be my knight in shining armour and rescue me from my old life. But then he slept with a stripper on his stag night and was unfaithful.”
This was when Katona spiralled out of control. “It was so bad. I was very famous at the time, so I had to be shipped to Arizona for therapy. I used to tell my life story like it was just a script. I thought it was normal. They had to peel back the layers. It took me a long time to learn to cry.” It didn’t stop her returning and marrying Mark Croft, a taxi driver who she says was her mother’s drug dealer.
With two of her children, Heidi and Max, 2025. “Although I had the wrong partners, I had the right children”
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“That should have been a one-night stand but I’m eternally grateful he gave me two amazing children, Heidi and Max.” Croft sold stories to the tabloids about his wife. Meanwhile, she was declared bankrupt. “I was reliving my childhood. It was a toxic, dark time.”
Then she married George Kay, a former rugby league player, who was arrested after allegedly assaulting her and died from an overdose in 2019. “It all sounds so bad. But I have another gorgeous daughter, DJ.”
‘I finally learnt I could be enough without men’
Now, she says, she’s a multiple divorcee and widow. “I finally learnt I could be enough without men. My children didn’t need a father if I could be the best mother. I always wanted to be Daddy’s little girl, to have the protection of a dad. I desperately wanted my children to have that, but it didn’t happen. I was so worried that I’d repeat the cycle, but I haven’t. We’ve made it work. I don’t regret the band, the drugs, the husbands. I am grateful, because, although I had the wrong partners, I had the right children.”
Work is now flooding in again. “I’m doing podcasts. I’m going on tour as Donna in Mamma Mia! for three months, performing at the O2. I do Butlin’s gigs. I do panto.” She is still a people-pleaser. “I love making people smile. My only addiction left is the press. I like being in the papers. But I do my own pap pictures and holiday photos now. I don’t want others making money from me.”
Which brings us back to OnlyFans. She is one of several celebrities, including Price, to appear on ITV in Olivia Attwood: Getting Filthy Rich, revealing their lucrative new careers. “Listen, I’d rather get my tits out for a grand a day than pick up litter,” she says. “You could sign up. I can show you. There is so much more to OnlyFans than tits. If you are a journalist and want to teach people how to write or you are a make-up artist, you can do an OnlyFans subscription. But for me, the quickest way is being sexual. I do it all myself. It’s dead easy. I don’t use filters or airbrushing. I could sit here while we’re chatting, take off my top, do a bit of heavy breathing, film it and upload it. Why wouldn’t I? Why are you not doing it?”
Does it make her think less of men? “I think they are all f***ers anyway. It’s not OnlyFans that made me think that. I don’t have a great respect for many men. It’s the way I have been treated by them. I’m probably more grateful now to them because they have made me so much money rather than making money out of me. I made £160,000 the first month. I thought, f*** me. Quick, bend over!”
With her partner, Paolo Margaglione, last November
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Her four daughters, she says, will not be doing it. “Let me do it all. They are too good for all this. Let me do what I need to do for them to be better than me.” How much does she make now? “I’m not saying because it’s just bragging, but a lot. In the millions. It all goes on the kids.”
If she had been born into a different life, what would she have liked to have been? “I’d love to have been an actress, but my name holds me back. I’m too redtop. I’m not even posh enough for Traitors, but I’d love that.” What about becoming a politician? She’s told me she’d like to campaign for more protection for young women starting out in the creative industries. “Nigel Farage texts me now and then. Of course he f***ing does. I bet he used to love a page 3 back in the day. Maybe he wants a discount.
“I’ve never voted in all my life. I couldn’t be a politician, but I think it’s the biggest scam how much tax we pay and yet look at all the potholes round here. It’s not good for my Lamborghini. And look at all the children still in care. Nothing gets done for them.”
Her children are her greatest achievement, she says. “I always wanted loads. They are my gang. I don’t have a social life. I don’t leave home much unless it’s for work. I’m a bit of a loner. Entertaining people is draining; I find it exhausting. If I go out, I’m always watched. I had a double vodka lime lemonade and a tequila shot on New Year’s Eve. But that is my limit.”
Will she be stuck with the press for the rest of her life? “I hope not.” Will she still do OnlyFans at 75? “Abso-f***ing-lutely. If my tits aren’t dragging on that floor and I am still making the money I am making, why would I not?
“For years it was a pity party. I felt sorry for myself. I thought I deserved a line of coke after my terrible childhood, my messed-up marriages, accountants stealing my money. I thought the world owed me a break. But no one is going to do anything for you. The only person who can is you.”
Olivia Attwood: Getting Filthy Rich is on ITV2 and ITVX on Sunday January 18 at 10pm