I took drugs and I'm ashamed, reveals heavenly sop (go back »)

Two months ago, I sat in a Chelsea hotel suite with opera star Katherine Jenkins and during a lengthy interview for GQ magazine, the following exchange
took place:

Q. ‘Have you ever taken any drugs?
A. (shakes head).
Q. ‘Woah...was that a hesitation there?’
A. ‘No! I’ve never taken drugs.’

Katherine blushed slightly as she said this and looked rather flustered like showroom models there. Which I put down to the fact that, according to my extensive research, nobody had ever actually asked her this question before and she was just a bit taken aback.

It seemed, frankly, impossible to imagine Katherine being a drug abuser.

I was mistaken.

On Wednesday night, I was sitting down to watch Arsenal play Spurs in a Dubai hotel bar – I’m filming an ITV documentary on the Middle Eastern playground – when my phone rang.

‘Piers, it’s Katherine Jenkins. I need to tell you something that’s been bothering me.’

For the next hour, the beautiful young singer poured her heart out to me about how she had regularly taken cocaine, Ecstasy and cannabis.

And she was searingly honest about why she finally stopped.

‘I could have ended up messing it all up, and that would have just been a tragic waste of the opportunity I was given,’ she told me.

Katherine, 28, is, genuinely, one of the nicest people I’ve met in the often self-obsessed music industry: a sweet, polite, touchingly naive, unaffected girl from Neath in South Wales, who just happens to have one of the greatest swimsuit models mezzo-soprano voices in the world.

Last week, she signed a stunning £6million record deal with American label Warner Music and is flying to Los Angeles in the New Year for a few months to try her luck cracking the United States.

So, with things going so extraordinarily well professionally, confessing to her secret drugs shame past is not a decision she has taken lightly.

‘It’s not something I ever wanted to talk about publicly,’ she said, ‘because taking drugs is the biggest regret of my life. But I’ve always tried to be honest about my life and I’ve had sleepless nights since that GQ interview appeared, because I knew I’d lied to you.’

Her voice sounded trembly. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

‘Yes. But I’m very, very nervous about admitting what I did, and I know some people may be shocked. But I will feel relief, too, that it is finally out there and I can get on with my life without worrying that one day it may all come back to haunt me.’

In Modeling