Loose Women’s Katie Piper recently journeyed to the US to film her new documentary in New Orleans Parish Prison, where she listened to the stories of the women locked up there. However, while Katie is a familiar presence on British TV, she’s not as well-known across the pond.
The shocking acid attack that forever changed Katie’s life is well-known to most Brits, but the inmates of New Orleans Parish had no clue about her past: “None of them know about me or my story,” she explained to the Sun TV magazine.
“So when I walked in for the first few days, they took the p**s out of me. Like someone shouts: ‘Whoa, calm down on the Botox, lady!'”.
Some of the prisoners even assumed that Katie had suffered burns while cooking methamphetamine.
Making this drug is a risky business. Emergency responders in the US have labelled meth labs as an “explosion waiting to happen”, and shockingly, up to 30% of all labs identified by police have been found due to a fire or explosion.
Katie says: “A lot of people get burns because, as it’s cooking, it can explode, and because they’re high, people don’t seek medical care.”
When the inmates learned the real reason behind her injuries, they were appalled. Katie underwent over 100 surgeries to treat the damage done to her face in the 2008 attack, after her ex-boyfriend, who had previously attacked and sexually assaulted her, paid someone to throw acid in her face, leaving her blind in one eye.
17 years after the horrific attack, Katie is still undergoing treatments to mend her damaged skin, face, throat, and eyesight.
Katie shares that when she recounted the details of the attack to inmates, many were moved to tears. However, hearing their own crime stories also deeply affected her, making her reflect: “God, what happened to me is nothing in comparison.”
She was shocked when some of the prisoners’ asked why she hadn’t shot her attacker, and she had to explain that gun ownership is quite a rarity in the UK.
The cultural differences between the US and UK became especially apparent to Katie, when she had to switch hotels during her documentary filming because of a shooting outside her initial accommodation.
While discussing the documentary with her husband Richard and daughters Belle, 11, and Penelope, seven, Katie admits she downplayed the danger she faced: “I tell my husband some of it, but not too much as I don’t want to stress him out,” she reveals.