Danniella: I do cocaine every week and I’d take 11 bags a day if I could
ACTRESS Danniella Westbrook has returned to rehab after TV presenter Jeremy Kyle offered to pay for it when she admitted on his show that she had been taking cocaine every week.
The former East-Enders star, 45, said she had relapsed after 14 years of ‘being clean’ and would now be using 11 bags of cocaine a day if she could afford it.
Miss Westbrook has struggled with drug addiction since the 1990s, when she was reportedly spending £1,000 a day on the habit.
A photo of her at the British Soap Awards in 2000 showed she had no septum because of her sustained cocaine abuse. It has since been surgically rebuilt.
In an emotional appearance on yesterday’s Jeremy Kyle Show, she admitted she was using cocaine again every week and would be doing so every day if she could.
‘If I had the money, I would be back to where I used to be, doing 11 bags a day,’ she said.
‘I only take coke, I don’t take anything else. I am unhappy and I’m sick of getting bullied by people in the press and with trolls. I try my best – I was 14 years clean.
‘I could walk down Oxford Street with Jesus strapped to my back and people still would say “cokehead”.’
She added: ‘Sometimes I think it would be better if I wasn’t here at all.’
Her friend Kyle then told her he was ‘going to do something today that I’ve never done on the Jeremy Kyle Show’, before revealing he would pay for her to go back to rehab for three months.
After yesterday’s show, Miss Westbrook tweeted that she was ‘grateful and excited’ to have the opportunity to get back ‘the drug-free life I had for 14 years’.
She added she was on a ten-week programme ‘which will change my life, make me strong’.
Miss Westbrook rose to fame when she joined the cast of East-Enders as Sam Mitchell in 1990, aged 16.
She had taken cocaine for the first time at a nightclub two years previously, but by the mid-1990s she was in the grip of a serious addiction.
At the time she criticised the BBC1 soap’s producers for not warning young cast members of the perils of fame and drug use, which meant she frequently showed up late for filming.
She was written out of the soap in 1996 and brought back in 1999, when her addiction got worse, culminating in the erosion of her nasal septum – the wall of cartilage and skin in the nose which separates the nostrils.