I’m a Celebrity Tziporah’s feud with pollie mum Pru

The tragic story behind jungle star Tziporah’s shocking fall from grace

When Tziporah Malkah knew she was heading to the jungle for I’m a Celebrity…, she reached out to the rich and powerful mother she has been estranged from for years to warn her she’d soon be baring her soul on national TV.

It could have been the start of a beautiful new chapter for this famously divided family, but the call just brought the former model, who used to be known as Kate Fischer, even more heartache.

Tziporah reveals her mum Pru Goward, who was last week made the NSW Minister for Family and Community Services, and Social Housing, on top of her role as Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, asked her “not to bring my name into it.”

“I respect my mother. I understand my mother, but she’s not motherly,” Tziporah told The Project’s Carrie Bickmore last week, admitting to others that her fiercely driven mum also told her to make the most of the opportunity.

Tziporah, 43, blames her mum for her tortured life, telling Woman’s Day they constantly fought when she was younger because Pru was “busy and ambitious,” and accusing her of giving all her love to politics.

So deep is the divide between the two, her mum did not know Tziporah was penniless and living in a women’s shelter in Melbourne for two years, because she felt she couldn’t ask for help or give her mum the “satisfaction of lording it over me.”

It’s a shocking confession for this former Canberra Girls Grammar School student, who was born into a wealthy family and blessed with such incredible beauty that she became a model at 13 and was shooting magazine covers in New York aged 16.

Her big break in Hollywood came in 1993, when she was picked to star in Sirens with Elle Macpherson and Portia de Rossi, and saw her beautiful face and semi-naked body splashed on billboards in the Big Apple.

Fast forward 24 years, and she is barely recognisable. She’s no longer Kate Fischer, after legally changing her name to Tziporah Malkah and reconnecting to her Jewish heritage. She then returned to Melbourne from the US so broke she considered sleeping rough under a bush.

“I’d tumbled from a great height,” admits Tziporah, who was famously engaged to billionaire James Packer until 1998, when she broke it off and fled to America, humiliated and heartbroken, to seek a new life away from the limelight.

Tziporah’s friends from when she was known as Kate say she has been searching for meaning and unhappy with her life for many, many years, while family friends say the often toxic relationship between Pru and Tziporah has left both women with emotional scars.

“Pru and Kate – I can’t call her by that other name – have always had their differences, but Pru’s never stopped loving her or worrying about her,” insists one family friend. “The whole thing is so terribly, terribly sad. I feel for them both.”

Tziporah revealed last week that her problems began when

she was just eight years old. Her parents divorced and she developed what would become a lifetime of eating disorders, including bouts of both bulimia and anorexia.

“I don’t have a healthy relationship with food,” she revealed to The Project. “By the time I’d started modelling at 13 I’d already had a chronic eating disorder for five years. It’s been a lifelong condition.”

When Woman’s Day found Tziporah living a reclusive life in Melbourne last year, she had already begun to turn her life around, completing a TAFE course and getting a job as an aged care worker. She admits she could never have predicted her own fall from grace.

“I was a princess in an ivory tower,” she says. “I didn’t see it. It didn’t occur to me what it’s like to really, really suffer. Since I’ve had this experience, it’s made me want to come back…”

Fans were certainly backing Tziporah’s return last week, with an outpouring of love and sympathy on social media for the brave woman who walked away from the Packer billions to search for love and meaning in Israel and the US.

That she lost the $2.5 million settlement she received from James to an unscrupulous Israeli man she fell in love with after moving to Los Angeles seems almost too cruel.

But even this terrible blow didn’t crush her, with Tziporah revealing the relationship led her to explore her Jewish heritage, which ultimately led to the “best moment of my whole life” when a rabbi confirmed she was still Jewish, even though her mum raised her as a Christian.

“I felt like a rainbow exploded around me,” she says.

Pru Goward did not respond to requests for comment.