‘Vile and nasty’ Katie Price is let off jail yet again
...despite admitting restraining order breach
KATIE Price escaped jail yet again yesterday despite admitting to breaching a restraining order by sending a ‘vile and nasty’ message to her ex-husband.
Price, 44, was taken to court after she sent a text message to Kieran Hayler branding his new fiance Michelle Penticost a ‘gutter slag’.
Mr Hayler and Miss Penticost said they were disappointed with the court’s decision, saying it sent the wrong message to the public.
The couple said in a statement: ‘We feel a custodial sentence would have sent the right message to the public given the seriousness of Miss Price’s offending.’
Price was subject to a five-year restraining order forbidding her from contacting Miss Penticost either directly or indirectly follow
‘Committed out of anger’
ing a row in a school playground in 2019. But earlier this year, the former glamour model sent the explicit text to Mr Hayler after Miss Penticost uploaded an Instagram post about how to deal with people who were treating you badly.
Mr Hayler reported the text to police and Price, a mother of five, was arrested in the early hours of January 21.
The message read: ‘Tell your f****** whore piece of s*** girlfriend not to start on me.
‘She has a restraining order so shouldn’t try [to] antagonise me as she is in breach and I’m sure she doesn’t want people knowing that she was having an affair with you behind my back. That gutter slag.’
At an earlier heading, a magistrate said the language directed at Miss Penticost was ‘vile and nasty’.
But Nicholas Hamblin, defending, said there had been a ‘ misunderstanding’ and Price clearly thought the restraining order ‘ worked both ways’. Yesterday, she appeared before Lewes Crown Court for sentencing after earlier pleading guilty to breaching the order.
Price narrowly escaped a jail sentence after the judge imposed an 18-month community order.
Judge Stephen Mooney told her she must carry out 170 hours of unpaid work and also pay £1,500 court costs.
He said the offence was ‘committed out of anger’ and said the words were ‘highly offensive and inflammatory’.
Price smiled and looked at the ground as the sentence was handed down. Her fiancee Carl Woods, 34, who was in the court public gallery, let out a sigh of relief and held his head in his hands.
The case is just the latest episode for the former glamour model. She narrowly escaped jail last December when she flipped her BMW X5 after drink and drug driving. She was given a 16-week sentence after she admitted her ninth driving offence – but it was suspended for a year on the condition she have treatment at the Priory Centre.
The suspended sentence could have been activated by Judge Mooney but he said that after reading psychiatric reports and listening to the mitigation to do so would be ‘unjust’.