MODEL Katie Price and pop pin-up Dane Bowers looked the perfect couple when they hooked up in the late 1990s.
But today, Katie's mum Amy Price reveals the relationship took a sinister turn.
It is the latest revelation from her book The Last Word, serialised exclusively in The Sun.
The concerned mum, 70, who needed a transplant late last year after developing a fatal lung condition, is telling her story because she fears she does not have much time left.
KATE first met Dane at the Wild Wild West film premiere in 1999.
As usual, Kate was all in from the word go.
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She seemed infatuated.
My take on Dane was that he was good-looking and straight talking, but arrogant.
We got on well with him initially, and he and Kate seemed in love.
For the first time, she seemed to be with a man who had comparable ambitions, so in that sense it was a good match.
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Dane was originally attracted to Kate’s glamour-girl status.
But the reality of being with a woman who was constantly on the covers of lad mags perhaps proved to be challenging for him and he became jealous of her and her career.
He left his band Another Level to pursue a solo career at the same time as Kate’s profile was in ascendance.
He seemed to resent this and started belittling her, calling her a “two-bit model”.
Although he teamed up with Victoria Beckham to produce the single Out Of Your Mind, his solo career hadn’t really taken off.
Perhaps it was jealousy, but in my opinion, he became ultra-critical of Kate, which seemed to increase her paranoia and exacerbate her feelings of low self-esteem.
Whenever I met up with Kate, I could tell how unhappy she was, and she seemed to be drinking too much in an attempt to blot out her misery.
I was at home when I received a call from her make-up artist and flatmate Sally Cairns, who told me that Kate had been taken to hospital after taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
According to Sally, Kate was at Dane’s flat when she swallowed the pills, but became very frightened when her heart started racing.
Thankfully she made the decision to phone Sally, who initially engaged her in conversation but then found her unresponsive.
Sally called Dane who in turn called an ambulance.
When the paramedics arrived, Kate was drifting in and out of consciousness but she managed, by some miracle, to open the door.
They found Kate clutching a photograph of Dane.
I knew that they were having problems, but I started to feel angry, as well as scared, she was acting out her feelings in such an extreme way.
My initial thought was, “No man is worth this.”
Panic-stricken, her stepdad Paul and I dashed to Croydon hospital.
We found her on a bed in a private room.
Sally was holding one hand, while the other was still clutching the picture of Dane, who was on a chair seated in the corner.
Kate, now awake, was distraught and crying non-stop, saying between sobs Dane didn’t want her any more.
This is when we began to worry about Kate and her mental health, and the impulsiveness and unpredictability of her behaviour.
I believe her issues have their roots in some awful events from her childhood.
Kate was six when she was molested at a park picnic by a man who lured her and two friends into scrubland.
Then when she was a teenager, a paedophile photographer made her pose in a school uniform with chocolate around her mouth — but she kicked off when he asked her to pose in nothing more than a T-shirt.
A few months later we discovered this man was a pervert who had been luring girls on the promise of modelling portfolios before drugging them with milkshakes.
Thankfully Kate had refused to drink one when he’d offered.
I truly believe the tragedy of the sexual predators she encountered as a very young girl had a profound effect on all her subsequent relationships.
We would see Kate’s flamboyant antics in the newspapers. She would dress outrageously to get noticed.
She would stick out her tongue and wink at the camera.
She would kiss other girls, show her knickers or lift her top up to show her boobs in a bra, or push them together for the camera. All this was to get noticed.
But when photos of her drunk and being carried out of clubs emerged following her split from Dane, that was different and we knew she wasn’t doing that for publicity.
We knew she was drinking to excess to hide her hurt because she didn’t know how to cope with another rejection.
Kate had endured a lot in her previous abusive relationships, but Dane’s rejection was playing out on a public stage, which came with its own humiliation and shame.
Silly things, like the fact she was banned from the guest lists and promotional events that Dane was attending, constituted a form of open rejection that Kate just wasn’t strong enough to endure.
She has coping mechanisms.
One that she developed very early on involved going out partying and it was being splashed across the tabloids.
A second, more concerning coping mechanism was (and still is) cosmetic surgery.
After the suicide attempt, to me the situation with Dane still seemed very unsatisfactory.
Dane was openly dating other girls, which he was entitled to do, as he was single, and yet Kate would pop around to his flat just for sex.
Was this a “friends with benefits” situation?
The on-off relationship finally ended after nearly two years and two months and Kate decided on a second boob job.
Kate would have done anything to get back with Dane, but it wasn’t to be, so she tried to put herself back together, literally and metaphorically, with a boob job, taking her from 32C to 32D.
To me, Kate’s need for surgery seems to be rooted in feelings of low self-worth, which materialise whenever a relationship ends.
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Back in the year 2000, I knew she needed help.
But there was no obvious person or place for a working-class family to go to find it.