What Katie did next

Recognised first for her beauty, second for her brains, Katie Piper thought she had everything going for her. But when, late last year, her boyfriend raped her and then hired a hitman to pour acid on the model’s face, Katie lost the world she knew. She tells Cathy Reay how different life is on the other side

My career was based on how I looked; I was defined by it. I pursued that dream because it was something I wanted to do; I wanted to be successful in it,” says Katie Piper. And the 26-year-old former model and television presenter was content.

“Everyone I came into contact with judged me on how I looked. If I went to an audition people accepted or rejected me based on my body.”

We are sitting in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, for the past 18 months, Katie has been receiving regular treatment to restore her burned face and neck. Thirty operations later, she’s nearing the end, but she has to wear a transparent plastic mask over the lower half of her face until early next year to stretch out her new skin.

“When this happened I told myself I would focus, I’d get through it; I knew I had a lot of surgery ahead of me. Each time I had an operation it was like a means to an end so I could go home and eat an onion bhaji! My family and I started joking around about it; I’d do things like compete with myself on how high I could count before the anaesthetic put me under.”

Her jokey attitude is admirable given the turmoil she has endured over the past year and a half. In March 2008 Katie’s boyfriend, a martial arts enthusiast who first made contact with her via Facebook back when she was a wrestling mascot girl, raped and physically abused her in a hotel room in west London. A few days later, he hired a hitman to approach her on the street and throw sulphuric acid in her face.

“[The hitman] had this cup, he looked like he was begging, so I got out some change to give to him and then he threw it in my face. At first I thought it was just hot coffee, but it kept burning. The thing was no-one knew what was going on, it wasn’t like I was on fire, people could easily just have assumed I was drunk and upset or something. It took a long time to get an ambulance to get me out of there.”

When she did eventually get to a hospital, the burns were so bad that surgeons had to remove the remaining skin from Katie’s face and then rebuild it with a skin substitute and graft, much of which was taken from other parts of her body. It was the first time the graft had been completed in a single operation. But recovery has been a gradual process.

“After the operation I was still completely blind and I kept having treatments and my eyes kept being washed. Eventually I could see through my right eye but everything was out of focus, I couldn’t read. It was frustrating going from 20:20 vision to blurry silhouettes but then when my vision came back I just thought “thank the lord”.

Katie went to France to receive aftercare which wasn’t available in the UK. She says she has been lucky: “After I had the treatment and psychological help it greatly reduced my disfigurement. When I see pictures of other women with acid burns some haven’t been as fortunate as me, they haven’t got their features in the right place or been able to speak properly.”

The former model still can’t see out of her left eye, but she doesn’t mind that much. She explains: “I don’t want to spend the rest of my time in the hospital. All the things that help me function have restored a good quality of life and I’m really pleased about that. I’m not going to go on to have cosmetic surgery because I’m not searching for perfection, not searching to restore my old face.”

Katie’s two attackers were both given life sentences. As she grew more positive about being able to resume her life, she decided to waive anonymity, so she could help other burns victims. She also agreed to have her experience filmed for a Cutting Edge documentary, Katie: My Beautiful Face, which aired on Channel 4 in October.

“I want to use my time now helping other people in the early stages of what I used to be in. I’ve had surgery and aftercare which could easily be available in the UK and [I feel like] it’s my duty to share that with people and say to Gordon Brown, this is cost-effective and more importantly, it’s more effective with patients. It’s something they should be entitled to. If it works and we know it works then why can’t we have it?”

As the documentary showed, Katie spent months indoors during her recovery, too scared to leave the house, scared of what people might think and say about her. She says: “I’ve gone from one side of the spectrum to the other; from being what society says is visually attractive and having men chatting you up, all the way down to where, in the early stages, my hair was shaved and I was bright red and people were kind of scared of me and reacted very negatively. So it’s definitely a shock.”

In addition to having to cope with strangers’ reactions to her new face, the harsh reality of what she now refers to as a quite superficial profession and social network meant that Katie couldn’t resume the job or some of the friendships she had either. “I think that’s one of the hardest parts about what happened, it wasn’t just losing my appearance and not feeling normal in society, it was losing everything that my world was: my friends, my job, everything.”

But she claims that this has made her stronger as a person. She’s had psychotherapy and has also relied on faith to aid her recovery. Now she knows who her friends are. “In my old life, people only helped me because they wanted something out of me or wanted to be with me because they thought I was a good person to be ‘seen’ with. So when people started helping me after the accident I would think, ‘why do they want to help me or have anything to do with me? Look at me’. It’s made me more secure.

“I think my self-esteem was actually lower before because I felt my looks were all I had going for me, everyone judged me on them. I still feel attractive and I don’t really see skin that’s damaged and lumpy as necessarily ugly. It’s different but why does different have to be shunned? I think sometimes when it’s a taboo subject and people are embarrassed or ignorant it’s not because people are unkind it’s because they are frightened and uneducated.”

Although the Cutting Edge documentary was filmed just a couple of months ago, given how afraid she was to face the real world, to deal with what she could see in the mirror, it’s clear that Katie’s attitude to life has drastically changed. And in perhaps the most self-assured statement she’s made since we began talking, she says: “Now it is 18 months on and it doesn’t bother me, I’m happy in my skin and I’m not looking to please anyone else.”