BEYOND BRAZEN
Katie Price spared prison despite being drunk in charge of her £130k pink Range Rover ... then boasts: I’m going CAR shopping
KATIE Price punched the air after receiving a threemonth ban yesterday for being nearly twice the drinkdrive limit while ‘in charge’ of her pink Range Rover.
The former glamour model, 40, turned to a friend as she left court and said: ‘I really don’t care anyway … and I’m so happy with that sentence.’
Price, who had drunk four ‘porn star martini’ cocktails before being found slurring her words and slumped in the back of her £130,000 car, said of her driving ban: ‘Brilliant, I thought I was about to get two years.’
The maximum sentence for being in charge of a motor vehicle while unfit through drink is a prison term of up to three months and/or a fine of up to £2,500.
Price is already disqualified from driving for a different offence, which runs out on April 9. Speaking outside Bexley Magistrates’ Court in south-east London, Price added: ‘I was given a choice of having ten points on my licence or to be disqualified for three months.’
She said she chose the threemonth ban because it will run concurrently with her existing disqualification ‘ which means I get my driving licence back on May 24 which means I can go car shopping. Let’s ban the pink car’.
She was also given a £1,500 fine and ordered to pay costs and a victim surcharge which brought her total bill to £2,425.
Police found Price in a ‘very’ drunken state in the back of her car in Shooters Hill, south- east London, in the early hours of October 10, the court heard. She claimed that an unnamed mystery man had earlier driven her car. But District Judge Nigel Dean said he did not find her to be a ‘plausible or credible’ witness.
He found her guilty of being in charge of the vehicle while over the legal limit, but ordered a second charge of drink-driving to be dropped because prosecutors offered insufficient evidence.
Outside court, Price said: ‘I was never drink driving – there was no evidence. I was convicted because the keys were inside the car.’
Price, who has had a string of money difficulties recently, was given 56 days to pay the fine and costs imposed.
PCs Benjamin Jones and Balvinder Mann initially saw the former model’s car veer off Shooters Hill Road and hit a grass verge at 12.40am before seeing it stationary about 15 minutes later.
She was found in the back of the Range Rover, which police noted had damage to the bumper and shrubbery attached to it, as well as vomit on the outside bodywork.
Price, of Horsham, West Sussex, blamed her fellow passenger, former boyfriend Kris Boyson, for not revealing the identity of the person who was supposedly driving her car back to his home in Istead Rise, Kent, following his 30th birthday party at a Turkish restaurant in Bexleyheath.
She told the prosecutor Mr Boyson would not reveal the name of his ‘mystery friend’ who was allegedly driving the couple but ‘ran off’ when the two men argued.
She said: ‘No, Kris is not helping me at all. That’s why I’m in this trouble. It’s stressing me and I am in court and he will not say who his friend was on the night.’
However, the district judge found she had been in possession of the key fob at the time of the arrest,
‘I thought I’d get two years’
during which time police saw the engine, lights and heating come on.
Price said she had drunk four cocktails known as porn star martinis that night, adding: ‘I was really drunk. I’m such a lightweight.’
Earlier PC Jones said he saw the pink Range Rover hit a grass verge at 12.40am but he put that incident down to ‘driver error’.
When travelling back along the same stretch of road with PC Mann 15 minutes later, they spotted the same car parked across a driveway at an angle and jutting into the road on double yellow lines. When PC Jones approached the vehicle, he found Mr Boyson in the front passenger seat and Price in the back of the vehicle behind the driving seat.
He told the court: ‘Her eyes were blurred and her speech was a bit slurred. Although she was sitting, it was in a slumped position.
‘I could smell alcohol. In my opinion she was drunk. I would say she was very drunk.’
Both Price and Mr Boyson said a third person had been driving and that he had ‘run off’ after the trio had an argument. When asked for further details of the driver who had run away, Mr Boyson he would not give his friend’s name because he was ‘not a grass’. Price claimed she didn’t know the driver because she had only just met him, but she had checked he was insured to drive her car.
She was arrested and taken to a police station for a breathalyser test after refusing one at the side of the road. She was found to have 69 microgrammes of alcohol in 100 millilitres of breath, almost twice the limit of 35 microgrammes.
Price was once said to be worth £45million, but is now reported to be in debt, having avoided bankruptcy last year.