- Culture
- 20 Nov 08
Kieron "Wolf" Ducie, describes what happened on the night Katy French passed away in compelling detail. He also recalls the build-up to the tragic events that unfolded.
It will be exactly a year on December 2 since Kieron ‘Wolf’ Ducie frantically drove the critically ill Katy French to hospital.
As the jeep raced – with a flashing blue light attached to its front – through the narrow country roads of the sleepy village of Kilmessan towards Navan Hospital, Ducie’s then girlfriend Ann Corcoran sat in the back of the jeep, panicking wildly, as she cradled the unconscious model in her arms.
Ducie recalls driving “like a madman”. All the lights were on in the car. Approaching bends, he pounded on the car’s horn – anything to warn people of the danger – as he shot through the winding back roads as fast as was humanly possible. “I nearly crashed the jeep a couple of times on the back roads. Crazy driving. Headlights were flashing. Tearing down the road. I’m sure there was people going, ‘Ring the police – there’s a madman on the road...’ It was pandemonium in the jeep. Mayhem.”
Halfway there, the 24 year-old model briefly regained consciousness but didn’t speak. Ducie remembers turning around to look at Katy French. The expression on her face, he says, will haunt both him and Ann till the end of their lives. “That look will never ever go away from me,” he says.
“Then she had another heart attack in the jeep.”
According to media reports, Katy had several heart attacks that morning.
By his own estimation, Ducie made it to Our Lady’s Hospital in Navan in a breakneck 12 minutes – about half the normal journey time. It was approximately 10am on Sunday morning when his jeep screeched up to the front of the A&E.
Some tabloids alleged that the 38-year-old Ducie had “dumped” Katy at the doors of the hospital. This rankles even now, almost one year on.
“I nearly drove the jeep through the front door of the casualty unit,” insists Ducie. “I came up close as I could to the doors. I remember jumping out – I left the keys in the ignition – and I grabbed her. There was nobody at the door waiting for me. I carried her through the door in my arms. I kicked the door and it swung open. I fell kind of sideways and knocked over trays of surgical equipment. I remember running through all the curtains and getting her onto a table. I was screaming at the nurse and doctor. The doctor – because I was in the way – pushed me out of there.”
Ducie was led away from the triage room. In a frantic bid to save Katy, medics injected her heart with adrenaline. Ducie and his girlfriend were ushered into the waiting room. Both of them were convinced that they had done enough. That Katy French was going to survive. “I looked at her and I thought, ‘She’s going to pull through it’. 100%. Katy’s a fighter. She had a great spirit and I could never see her not...”
The waiting was horrendous, but there was hope. Then one of the hospital staff asked him for a contact number for Katy’s mother. “When they asked my heart sunk,” he says. He felt that the worst had happened. Or would. “Katy’s phone was dead and I was looking for her mother’s number. I rang a couple of colleagues to get the number,” he recalls. “We waited then until her mother arrived. It was about 1pm or 1.30pm, I think.”
Ducie decided against talking to Janet French when he saw her dash into the hospital. “It wasn’t a good time. Her mother didn’t know who I was. The doctor said, ‘You should probably leave now with your girlfriend’. I knew I wouldn’t be star of the moment. Emotions would’ve probably ran high – ‘Who’s this guy?’ type of thing.”
He left in the company of his girlfriend Ann.
Ducie has been criticised in the media for not calling an ambulance, to take Katy from his house.
“If I had waited for an ambulance there was no way she was going to make it. An ambulance would have taken 20 minutes to get to my house – I got her there in 12 minutes. And the Guards know that. I’ll be honest with you. I knew at that point that Katy hadn’t got 40 minutes – 20 minutes to the house and 20 minutes back to the hospital. It was a judgment call and I’ve never regretted it.
“The minute I got the girl into my jeep, I rang the emergency service. It was very heart-wrenching when the media turned on me afterwards, but I’m glad they picked on me and that they didn’t pick on Ann. She was my girlfriend and she probably wouldn’t have been as strong mentally as me. But I took it on the chin. I don’t know why, but I was painted as a villain and it kind of suited the newspapers to push that. I brought the girl to the hospital and I done my best to save her.”
But it was too late. Katy French had suffered brain damage. For the next four days, she lay in a coma until her family had to make the terrible decision to switch off the life-support machine on December 6. A year on, the coroner’s report has yet to be published.
Rewind to 29 November 2007. Less than 100 hours before her tragic death, Katy French was preparing for her belated 24th birthday party (she was born on October 31, 1983), which was being held at Krystle Nightclub in Dublin and filmed for a programme on TV3. She had invited numerous high-profile celebrities, as well as all her modelling colleagues, friends and family.
Many of the so called A-list names didn’t turn up. More surprisingly, however, many of her modelling colleagues also went missing. But then the previous week Katy had given an interview to the Star On Sunday, in which she admitted to taking cocaine.
“I feel that because of the interview she was shunned by an awful lot of her colleagues – to the extent that they wouldn’t go to the party or associate themselves with her.
“The media went to her birthday party and they slated Katy because her friends didn’t turn up. They built her up – and, in fairness now, I won’t say Katy didn’t love the press because she did and she had a great relationship with the press – but, like all things, I think her expiry date had come. And she knew that. She had often said to us, ‘One day, they will turn on me!’ It was just unfortunate that the Star On Sunday interview was the catalyst that started all of it.”
Katy, Ducie says, regretted revealing that she had done drugs. The night before the controversial front page admission was printed, on November 25, she had appeared on RTÉ’s Tubridy Show. Afterwards Katy headed to Krystle with Ducie and Ann Corcorcan.
“That night we were all after having a good few drinks and the head of security in Krystle’s agreed to drive us home, in the Range Rover that Katy drove. So I left my jeep in town,” remembers Ducie.
Back in Kilmessan, the three of them continued drinking at Ducie’s bar, which is situated upstairs. At about 6.30am, Katy became upset. Her head in her hands, she was shaking. She told Ducie that she had done an interview admitting that she had used cocaine.
According to Ducie, Katy told him that one of the newspapers claimed to have photographs of her doing drugs and that if she didn’t do an interview the story would be printed anyway.
“Kate Moss made millions out of it,” he says. “But in Ireland we’re still living back in the ‘50s with the way the culture is. It’s taboo. It’s not a good thing to be doing. She regretted it. She said it to me, ‘It was a mistake!’”
The story was printed just four days before her party. The effect, apparently, was immediate.
“Katy texted me saying, ‘I’m getting a few weird texts here – and people ringing up saying that they can’t go to my party. Do you know if anything is going on?’ I said no. There was more excuses coming in from the models... ‘My granny’s sick!’ or ‘My aunty broke her leg!’ or ‘I have pneunmonia!’ It was ridiculous.”
Among those who didn’t make the party was Jim Mansfield, with whom she had been romantically linked. He was in Spain. Andrea Roche also missed out, as did her husband P.J.Mansfield.
“It’s too coincidental when you have at least 40 fucking models saying, ‘A hurricane’s after hitting my house there five minutes ago!’ I think it was because of the interview she’d done over the cocaine thing,” Ducie says. “But, with some of them, jealousy was also a big factor. She was the biggest model and was getting a lot of the work. But she was being herself. She was promoting herself. She was doing it right.”
On the night of the party, Ducie recalls Katy texted him asking, ‘Will you go inside (to Krystle) and make sure people are there?.’
“She waited around the block with her Mam and her sister – I went upstairs and I texted her back, ‘Don’t be worrying! The place is packed with people’. Now, I went upstairs and I seen only two models! Michelle McGrath and Sara Kavanagh. My heart sunk. All her real friends were there, as were journalists. Still the papers slated her. Every person wants Bono at their birthday party. So what he didn’t come? He hardly knew her. It was a great night. The image in my head still stands there of her getting out of the car... she looked stunning. Later on that night, when the party ended, we sat downstairs in the residents’ bar in Krystle’s and we talked. She was actually happy. If she was a bit disappointed about the models not showing, she kind of masked it.”
They may have merrily used shots of a leggy Kate, looking gorgeous in a short gold dress, as she emerged from the Rolls Royce in which she arrived at Krystle – but otherwise coverage in Friday’s newspapers was less than flattering.
“I got a call off her,” Ducie says. “She was very upset. ‘Did you see the papers? Can you believe they didn’t turn up?’ That was what she said.”
Ducie says she then sent him the following text message: ‘It’s humiliating. It’s disgusting. I just can’t handle this. They are picking on me...’
They spoke on the phone again. “I said, ‘Look! I had a brilliant night. Don’t be worrying about all that – at least you know who your friends are!’ I’m not being bad... you’re throwing a party; you’re giving everybody free drink and food, so wouldn’t you rather 10 decent friends there than 150 people who despise you?’ I put it that way to her. She went, ‘You’re right, Kieron’.”
However, it would later emerge that Katy’s cocaine revelations would have more serious repercussions...
According to reports, Katie spent some of Saturday with Brendan O’Connor of the Sunday Independent. She also met Andrea Roche at Dundrum Shopping Centre, apparently to discuss making a pilot for a TV programme they had been planning. From there she went to her mother’s house.
Ducie next heard from Katy French on Saturday evening, December 1. Clearly something had upset her deeply in the meantime. Ducie was attending a stag party with some friends at another frequent haunt, Cocoon – a nightclub owned by the ex-Formula 1 race driver Eddie Irvine – when Katy contacted him. It was 9.30pm.
“I got a text message from Katy saying, ‘What’s the story? What’s going on? Where are you?’ I replied and she texted me back saying, ‘I’m a little bit upset. Where’s Ann? I just want to talk to someone’. Ann was in bed. I rang Ann and told her that Katy wanted to talk to her. Ann was unwell after being out drinking for two nights, but she still told Katy to come out to the house.
“So, I drank a bottle of vodka with my friends at Cocoon. We left there at around 1.30am and went to Lillie’s Bordello. They have me on CCTV footage going into Lillie’s. We had a few drinks there and left at about 3.30am. I ended up going over to my friend’s apartment in Swords. I got a text message from Ann asking where I was. At 5am, I got another text message asking me to come home. I left at around 5.45am. I got home at about 6.45am. I’m not too sure of the exact time. It was Sunday morning – it was bright outside.”
When Ducie barrelled into his house after a hard night’s partying, he walked into the kitchen: the plasma TV was switched on, with the volume turned down. He saw that Katy’s mascara was running down her face – she had obviously been crying.
“I said, ‘What’s going on?’” says Ducie. “Katy started coming out with an awful lot of things. ‘They all hate me. They don’t like me... do you see the way the media are depicting me? I have no friends. I didn’t really have many friends in school... You and Ann are my mates and I can talk to you guys. I don’t have any other friends...’
“I said, ‘Of course you have friends... everybody has friends...’ My house isn’t five minutes away from the city centre, you know? The newspapers were making innuendos as if there was some sort of ulterior motive for Katy coming out to my house. We were having a heart-to-heart. The girl was spilling her heart out. That’s why she went to Ann. She rang a lot of people that night and nobody answered her calls. She told me that. She said it to Ann as well.”
Ducie sat down with the two women and they talked for the next two hours.
“They were drinking. I had Lanson champagne there... there was a couple of bottles of champagne. Ann was drinking coffee and I think there was vodka and Red Bull there as well. I had drinks with them. I sat down and had some vodka and Red Bull and Katy was drinking vodka and pouring champagne in on top of it.”
He says the conversation still haunts him. As the drinks flowed, Katy revealed that her relationship had ended that day.
“She was told it was basically because of the Star On Sunday interview and her friends weren’t talking to her either. There’s an awful lot of things Katy said that night that I wouldn’t tell anybody. It was very personal information.”
Katy hinted that she’d have to look for new accommodation. Whatever had happened, she could no longer stay in her City West apartment because of its proximity to her former love interest who was apparently shunning her over the cocaine story.
“The girl was visibly distressed. An awful lot had happened to her in three days. We sat and we talked for a while. She talked a lot about her sister and her mother that night. About how she was very proud of her Mam. And her sister being an artist.
“I actually said to Katy: ‘You need a break away from this... get a break and lie down low for a while... stop trying to push yourself. There’s a limit!’ It was like a machine and she was running with this machine and I think she felt she had to keep going and keep going. Katy always wanted a career – and that was what she was pushing for – in TV. That was the goal.
“I could be brutally honest with her – that’s what she liked about me. She’d be sitting there rambling on and I’d say, ‘Katy, you’re talking awful shite!’ And she’d laugh because she had all these ‘yes’ fuckers around her, telling her that she was great. When it takes a friend to bring you down to earth, I think you kind of appreciate that friend a bit more. That’s how herself and myself and Ann got on. There was no bullshit around us.
“We just talked for a few hours and then she got up and said, ‘I want to go now...’ And she picked up her keys for the jeep. She was going to make dinner for her aunty on that Sunday. I stopped her in her tracks and I said, ‘No. Don’t take the keys for the jeep – you’re not driving’. God forbid if she drove down the road and the girl crashed into somebody on their way to mass. That’s what I thought.
“It was about 8.30am or 9am. I told her to go into bed. I brought her up to the room and I said, ‘Katy, get some sleep’. Ann pulled the blinds down. She still had her clothes on. I pulled the quilt back, took her shoes off her, and put her into the bed.”
“She said, ‘Kieron, would you get me a glass of water?’”
According to Ducie, these were Katy French’s last words.
“I brought her a bottle of Ballygowan and I put it beside the bed and I said, ‘There you go’. I went up to bed with Ann. I still had my clothes on. I was sitting at the side of my bed and Ann was telling me an awful lot of in-depth stuff – stuff that one girl would tell another girl. I was shocked. We were talking for about 10 or 15 minutes and then I heard a big bang on the floor. She had fallen out of the bed and hit a big mirror that’s in the room. I shouted down but I didn’t hear anything. I ran down to the room and Katy was on the floor and she was having a seizure.
“I grabbed her off the floor and lifted her onto the bed. Her body was just shooting... her arms were shooting back and forward. Her eyes were bulging. She was foaming around the mouth. I was just horrified.”
He remembers saying to Ann, ‘Just get the fucking jeep open...’
“I got her into the jeep. There was no waiting. I don’t know what time it was. It’s like somebody throwing a grenade into this room now – time freezes. Go to the time of the 999 call and go back a couple of minutes because it was instant...
“The rest is history...”
Did you see Katy taking drugs that night?
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “The papers were making accusations that there was loads of drugs on the table. Ann doesn’t do drugs. There was no drugs done that night. Definitely no drugs. Ann said Katy never did drugs in front of her. The Guards asked about how many times Katy went to the toilet and Ann replied, ‘As many times as you go to the toilet or I go – how the fuck would I know?’ The Guards checked the toilets – the wiped everything with swabs. Everything. Floors. Walls. They can pick up the most minuscule particle. You’d never – if drugs were used in your house – get away from it. Ann told me, ‘That girl never did drugs in your house’. I believe it.
“I know it’s frustrating. I remember the guards sitting there going fuckin’ nuts over it as well. But, at the end of the day, I’m not going to say something that I didn’t see. I said that same thing to the coppers that I’m telling you.”
It subsequently emerged, according to Ducie, that Katy was captured on CCTV footage at a petrol station in Clonee, apparently purchasing drugs, prior to visiting Ann Corcoran. She had also been taking valium and diet pills, according to other reports. “There’s a big question mark – Katy left her mother’s house at 11.30pm and she got to Kilmessen at 1.30am. The M50 has no fucking queues on a Saturday night,” he states. “They are saying it’s a seizure from a suspected drugs overdose, but I don’t know. She didn’t do drugs in my house that night – and that’s 100%. Whether she done drugs anywhere else that night I don’t know.”
Have you ever taken cocaine?
“No. Never. I’ve never used drugs,” he states. “To be honest with you, I never seen Katy doing drugs. I’m not going to say it doesn’t happen. But I never seen her doing drugs because Katy knew how I felt about drugs. I have a younger brother with a drug problem and I’ve seen what drugs can do to families. I’m totally anti-drugs. I’ll go into a nightclub and drink bottles of vodka and fall out of the door on my face and wake up tomorrow with a hangover. That’s all I do.”
It’s been alleged in the media that you are a drug dealer…
“No, I’m not,” he insists. “They basically made innuendos that I was a drug dealer. I have no criminal convictions. I’ve never done anything on anybody. About as exciting Kieron Ducie’s life has ever been has been a divorce and four penalty points for speeding. That’s the limit of it, you know?
“I think the Gardai were going, ‘Oh, my God! This Wolf is the biggest crime lord the country’s ever seen! He’s bigger than any of them – Gilligan, the lot of them’. They were trying to put this innuendo out that I’ve been under the radar for years and operating with impunity in this massive circle of celebrities who all use drugs.”
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Apart from the drug-dealing allegations – which have never been substantiated – it was also alleged in various reports that Kieron Ducie was actually having a drug-fuelled party in his home at the time Katy fell ill.
“They made innuendos that I let the girl die,” says Ducie bitterly. “They said that I was in the house and when this big so-called celebrity party was going on, Katy fell ill and I put her into one of the rooms and she got very ill and everyone fled the house. And they made innuendos that I did a big clean-up operation. They made innuendos that I had denied the girl medical attention. There was no big celebrities jumping into helicopters; there wasn’t a taxi rank outside; there was no limos speeding off in the middle of the night. And there was no queue of ambulances outside my house.”
After Katy French’s death, certain tabloids questioned why Ducie would have a flashing light – similar to those used by the emergency services – attached to his jeep. He says the explanation is simple: “We have a unit in the jeep because it’s used as an escort vehicle for wide load trucks. My father’s company transports generators and wide loads – we have 40 footer trucks.”
Then, after the Gardai searched his house, it was reported that they had discovered a police identification badge. This – coupled with the reports of the flashing lights on his jeep – painted Ducie in a suspicious light.
Why did you have a Garda document in the house?
“When the Guards came to my house that evening – on the Monday, I think – they basically did an intensive search. They were looking for drugs. It wasn’t a Garda badge, as was reported in one newspaper – it was a Garda identification card, which is a laminated credit card with a face imposed on top of it.
“The real reason that was there was that I’d bought a brand new suite of furniture – about a week before Katy came to my house – and I took the old one outside and cut it open and I found my credit card, change and this other card. I threw it under the bar. And the night the Gardai came to the house, one of them picks it up. It belonged to a good friend of mine, who’s a member of the Garda for over 20 years. He was in my house dozens of times. It would have looked suspicious if I hadn’t known the Guard. The whole irony of it was that identification card was reported lost six years previously.”
With the tabloids following his every move, Ducie and his girlfriend reluctantly decided against attending Katy’s funeral – which again was interpreted in a sinister light. “I was going to go,” he says. “I was staying in my sister’s place and I hadn’t been home in a week, so I went down and bought a new suit. I remember my friend Brian Ormond saying, ‘Definitely turn up because they’ll paint you in a bad light!’ The massive amount of media attention camped outside my house was ridiculous. It actually kills me to this day – I had a judgment call and I thought, ‘They’ll make a circus out of it!’ I didn’t want that to happen because it would have detracted from the day of the girl – me standing there, shoving cameras in me face, reporters – supposedly there to show their respect – asking a million questions. I didn’t do that and if that was my daughter I’d probably expect the same thing at least.”
Have you ever visited her grave?
“I have visited Katy’s grave several times. The first time was very tough. I was at the grave last week. I’m not going to go up there for the anniversary because there will be guys sitting there with cameras. I will commemorate it. How could I ever forget her? She was a very close friend.”
Ducie says he is now planning to take legal action against several newspapers over the stories written about him.
“Newspapers have said a lot of terrible things about me – and they could say more tomorrow. I’m taking defamation actions. There’s a word that papers don’t comprehend – it’s accountability. Somebody will be held accountable. I even said it to one journalist, ‘Keep writing more bullshit about me – because we’ll add more zeros to that cheque’. I mean it. They underestimated me in one thing – they actually thought, ‘OK, he’s an ordinary guy who doesn’t have the money to fund his defamation actions’. But they made a fatal mistake: my father has the money to fund it. And my father’s a man of principle and he’s not letting them get away with this.”
He is clearly very bitter about the way he has been portrayed in the media.
“Some journalists have taken advantage of the situation – they’ve twisted words, manipulated some things I said or done. I’ve sat down and thought about this a load of times – why me? Why did I get lambasted? Why did I get – for lack of a better word – shafted by the papers? I think every story has to have a villain. I was painted as a villain because I had a nickname, ‘The Wolf’, which was given to me by a friend of mine because I bought a timber wolf crossbreed with an Alsatian dog. People used to laugh at me when I had this thing because it was howling every night of the week. That’s how I got the nickname – there was never a derogatory meaning to that.
“It was a very bitter pill to swallow. It was especially very hurtful on my family. My father is a very respectable businessman; my mother goes to church every Sunday. It’s very hard for any parent to pick-up a newspaper and see loads of lies written about their son.
“From the very beginning, I told the truth. I never lied, but I never told the papers – out of respect for Katy and her mother and her sister and her father and friends – I didn’t want to tell the story. And I got slated for that. I got bullied for it. I got intimidated for it. I got vilified for it. The media have to sell a story and, unfortunately, because I wouldn’t tell anybody the story, editors and journalists sat in their offices and made up the story to con the public. As my granny used to say to me, ‘A paper never refuses ink!’ Katy would say the same thing, ‘Tomorrow’s chip paper’. But, unfortunately, for me it wasn’t tomorrow’s chip paper – it was 11 months of media intimidation, humiliation. I don’t know what else I can say about that.”
The papers are saying Katy’s mother doesn’t consider you to have been a real friend of her daughter’s.
“They’re trying to twist it. It was actually a tactic used by a couple of newspapers who weren’t getting interviews off anybody. I also believe that one particular individual who was close to Katy gave her mother an inaccurate portrayal of me. In respect for Mrs French, she was grieving a lot and it’s understandable that she didn’t want to talk to anybody. It was her daughter who’d died. But then they started to make innuendos that Katy didn’t know me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being bad – but would your mother know every one of your friends? My mother wouldn’t know every one of my friends. I had no reason to go to her mother’s house. Why would I want to go to her mother’s house? I was in a relationship.”
Did Katy call out frequently to your house?
“Katy would have been out to my house more than a dozen times in the year. She’d call out and we’d sit down – I have a bar in my house – and we’d have a drink and a chat. She’d come out on a regular basis – every few weeks – and have a drink with us.
“She had a very busy schedule, but she wasn’t really a girl to go out with a lot of the models and sit around having a laugh with them. OK, she worked with them but I think she kept that to the professional end of things – much to her own detriment, because a lot of them probably misunderstood that as snobbery, as ‘Who does she think she is? Does she think she’s better than us?’ But as with Glenda (Gilson)... I often seen Glenda’s success story as being a very natural girl, who’s very bright and very easy to get on with and to talk to – and Katy kind of went that route as well. I’m a people person and Katy was a people person and that’s why I think we got on.”
Ducie admits he has suffered serious bouts of depression, brought on, he says, as a direct result of being in the media spotlight.
“They nearly broke me. I would admit it. This stuff gets in on you and when you it read every day you actually start to believe some of the stuff that they were writing. It was a really tough period for me. The lowest was months and months later when Ann and my relationship started deteriorating. It was unbearable. We stayed in. It was as if we were locked in; we were prisoners. I didn’t go out into the city centre for about eight months. I paid the ultimate price – I lost my girlfriend. We had a relationship for four years and I loved Ann completely and I still love her. It’s been very hard on both of us.
“My father’s business suffered with adverse publicity. The innuendos they printed – because our companies have high profile clients like the Revenue Commissioners and the Garda Síochána and an awful lot of those companies would rely an awful lot on the integrity of people. My sister holds a high-profile job and she was bullied as well and she was put into the newspaper – she was even passed over in her job because of that.”
Did you go to counselling to deal with this?
“I did talk to a counsellor and I tried to get an awful lot of things off my chest. A lot of things were all bottled up inside. It did help.”
Did you ever become suicidal?
“There’s no point in lying; I will admit it. It did get to one point where it was that. It’s like a line that you cross and I nearly got to cross that line. I got so low that you think to yourself, ‘Is there any other way out of this?’ I’d never had that much pressure put on me.
“You have to talk to somebody, you know? I often wondered why I wasn’t crying as much I thought I would. I thought I’d grieve a lot more – and I remember asking the counsellor that. Then it just hit me when I was over with Ann in the South of France. Something had just came into my head about Katy and I remember saying to Ann, ‘I really do miss her’. That was the tipping point. I actually started breaking down. It was really tough. Ann was devastated. Ann misses her dearly. And Ann doesn’t want to talk about it and I’m glad they (the media) respect that. I was devastated but my problems are minuscule – I can only imagine the French family’s grief.”
In terms of family, it won’t have escaped the attention of the media that Kieron’s brother Kevin, who has acknowledged problems with drugs, was sent down last week for 18 months on drink-driving charges. It’s the kind of publicity that most people need like a hole in the head. Nevertheless, some media outlets are suggesting that Kieron Ducie has been purposely seeking publicity – that he wants to be famous.
“Famous for what? This isn’t a popularity contest. I don’t make any money out of these papers. I make my money from running my father’s company. One newspaper offered me €100,000 for this story. I turned it down flat. Another newspaper offered me €30,000. From day one, I’ve never taken one penny from any newspaper. She was my friend. Every week I see my name in the paper over some conspiracy theory. I want to tell my story now and move on.
“I plan on selling my house. I want to get out of there. I was very nearly contemplating leaving the country and getting away from it all. People think, ‘There’s your man again in the papers!’ I don’t ask for my picture to be taken. For eight months they were using one photo of me – that’s shows how adamant I was, not giving them pictures. And they used probably the worst picture of me ever!
“The media were trying to portray me as this ‘Party Wolf’ – using the nickname to vilify me. They wanted to depict me as if I was some crazy sort of party animal. When I go to a nightclub now, people offer me back to about 20 parties because they think I’m some sort of fucking madman and great entertainment, which is bullshit. People come up to me in nightclubs and they go, ‘Tell us about Katy?’ I would never ever talk about her in a nightclub. I don’t like going there at all with people. I get recognised everywhere I go. It’s the look that I get – ‘There’s that guy!’
“But, as my dad always says to me, ‘The truth always comes out’. I’m getting my truth out now. But this is my last interview. I don’t want to speak again about it. I want to go into 2009 with a bit of a future ahead of me.”
Kieron Ducie did not seek any payment for this interview.