EXCLUSIVE Katie Hopkins: ‘Twitter Rape Threats Are Worse Than Anything I Ever Post’
Katie Hopkins has had her fair share of run-ins with the law due to her controversial comments—but she believes she puts up with far worse from users on Twitter.
“Have I always received worse things on Twitter than anything I’ve ever put out there? I contest that to be true. People have threatened to rape me with a machete. That’d get ignored,” she exclusively told Yahoo Celebrity.
“I may post something a little bit controversial and I end up getting questioned in a police station. I think getting threatened with rape or death - I just had two death threats today - is worse.”
But she adds, “I see what the police are saying … I’ve got 600,000 followers, that’s an audience.”
The 40-year-old reality star-turned-documentarian returns to screens this weekend in Katie Hopkins: Fat Story 1 Year On on TLC UK. It follows her journey one year after gaining and losing a massive four stone and also sees her catch up with members of the fat club she set up to help overweight people lose weight.
When her original documentary, My Fat Story, aired in January 2015, viewers saw controversial scenes in which one woman called the police and reported Katie for a ‘hate crime’ after the star questioned her weight.
So what happened next? “They told her to suck it up and stop wasting police time. I was like, ‘Yes! Come on!’,” says Katie.
But being reported to the police is par for the course for the motormouth columnist.
She says, “It does happen, mainly from my Twitter, so the police and me are fairly well acquainted.
“The law is quite a good egg really and I’m really supportive of the police as a whole.”
Prior to My Fat Story, Katie contended that losing weight was as simple as ‘eating less and moving more’. But having gained and lost an ample amount of weight in the space of a few short months herself, the star admits she now realises the psychological and emotional implications of obesity.
“The bigger bit of it was this emotional [storm], it took over everything.
“Running is the thing that keeps me happy about life … I used to say to people, ‘For God’s sake, just go for a run.’ And then when I was big, you aren’t going to put on trainers and go for a run, you feel like a bit of a weirdo, maybe someone will say something,” she said.
“I went for a bike ride, I used to say ‘Dear God, that poor bike’, I was now anxious people would say that about me.”
The Celebrity Big Brother runner-up is now hoping to segue the success of her fat club, which has seen incredible results over the last year, into a career of more TV transformations—and she’s putting reality TV in the rearview.
She explained, “One lady lost four stone. Another lady, with eight kids, has lost six stone. Another lady was diabetes type two and doesn’t have it anymore. People have changed their lives - I love that.
“I’ve done reality. I’d like to do something else along the lines of Fat Story, because it’s truer to me and more journalistic, I suppose. My theme for 2016 is a new transformation of Katie Hopkins.”
Katie Hopkins: Fat Story 1 Year On premieres Saturday 2nd January, 9pm on TLC
