On September 15, 2005, UK tabloid newspaper Daily Mirror published a photo of super model Kate Moss above the headline 'Cocaine Kate: supermodel Kate Moss snorts line after line."
The photo, and several more printed on subsequent pages, was allegedly taken in a West London recording studio where her then-boyfriend Pete Doherty's band Babyshambles were working. The story cost the English model lucrative contracts with Chanel, Burberry & H&M, and, although Doherty had nothing to do with the leaked images, the scandal negatively impacted Moss' relationship with the former Libertines co-frontman.
“Kate’s big thing was ‘not taking her for a cunt’,” Doherty wrote in his 2022 memoir A Likely Lad.
“Before I was with Kate, I was never in the tabloids,” Doherty says in a new interview with journalist and broadcaster Kirsty Young for her BBC Radio 4 podcast Young Again. “I was head over heels in love and just having a proper knees-up, really. I thought it was a sacrifice worth making. A hit worth taking. She was the opposite. She was like, ‘This will not be tolerated. I spent years building a profile and you’re not going to throw my hard work away.’”
Speaking to Young, Doherty admits that having made the journey from the front page of the NME to the front pages of Britain's most notorious newspapers, he had no idea how to deal with the ramped-up press interest in his life.
“You can’t really beat these people,” he says. “It’s a bit like a virus. There’s nothing sporting about it. There are no rules to it. It’s just, ‘How can we make this sound as bad as possible and sell more papers?’ I’d be like, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll write an amazing song that’s so beautiful… they’ll have to write about it’. But they never did.”
In his memoir, Doherty admitted that his two year relationship with Moss was perhaps always doomed to failure.
“There was not really one specific incident that finished the relationship,” he wrote. “Our worlds were not really compatible in the end. There were all sorts of incidents. She had this panic button by her bed and a panic button in the kitchen. One day, when she was away somewhere and I was scrabbling down by the side of the bed, for a dropped rock probably, I accidentally pressed the panic button and 12 armed police ended up at the cottage in St John’s Wood. She was really unhappy about things like that. It became a running battle, really, that relationship. It was always the same, for all those years: highs and then crushing, violent lows. It was not sustainable.”
These days, Doherty is clean, but he is entirely mindful that his battle with addiction may not yet be won.
“Obviously, you still have to be on your toes, because it’s a funny old thing, addiction,” he admits. “They say that when you get clean, your addict is just in the corner doing press-ups. A really strong tie has severed, but you’re never completely free.”
