KATY KNEW HOW TO SPIN THE PERSONA SHE HAD CREATED

2007 was said to be the year of the French. Katy was one of the most debated and, at times divisive, women on our island for a short time. She was funny and selfdeprecating through it all.

In 2007, Katy was a panellist at a public discussion on the Irish model industry. The T-shirt she wore that day said as much about her as a thousand words ever could. The letters spelled out: FOKF. By wearing that she was referencing her own self-awareness and her own detractors who were sick of the sight of her in magazines — and as such, had coined the acronym, FOKF. ‘F*** Off Katy French’.

Katy was dubbed everything from the “mistress of spin” to someone who was “addicted to self-publicity”. Neither of which was untrue, perhaps. Even at 24 she was a seasoned media manipulator. In late January, 2007, she began to ring regularly, to chat — and place stories in my column, which I was happy to do. She kept saying how she had been receiving certain texts. When I told her I wanted to see the texts, she refused. She rang later and changed her mind. At 4pm the next day, she turned up in the

Sunday Independent office and let me look through her mobile and have the texts photographed. That was the mistress of spin in action.

The distance between her public image in magazines and newspapers and her private self seemed to be shortening all the time. As she once said of her tabloid creation: “I nearly start to believe it myself sometimes.”

Katy was young but she wasn’t naive. “When a journalist calls me about a story, I have to think, ‘OK, what’s my strategy? What cards am I holding that I can haggle with a bit?’” she told Hot Press in 2007. And then: “I know — and my mother and my close friends know — that the image portrayed of me in the tabloids is far, far from what I am... It is a persona that makes me money. It is a business and you have to treat it like a brand.”

In her extended meditation from 2012, Katy French: National Identity, Postfeminism, and the Life and Death of a Celtic Tiger

Cub, Anne Sexton wrote that Katy was “lauded and castigated as an icon of the so-called Celtic Tiger... [and] acted as nexus point for hot-button social issues related to sexuality, femininity, consumerism, multiculturalism, and national values”.