Now a mum of two, Kate DeAraugo is sober, working in construction and hosting a podcast. Photo / Getty Images
Winning Australian Idol at 19 seemed like the pinnacle of achievement for Kate DeAraugo, as well as her fans.
But standing on stage at the Sydney Opera House, the talented musician couldn’t possibly have predicted the downward spiral she’d experience over the next decade. A spiral that would include severe drug addiction, sleeping rough inside shooting galleries, and ultimately being attacked with a machete by a drug-affected ex-partner.
Even at the time of her finale success, DeAraugo says she was “mostly dissociated” from her life.
“I was 16 the first time I auditioned,” she tells Gary Jubelin in this week’s episode of his podcast I Catch Killers.
“And to be totally honest, I don’t remember those times a lot. I spent so much of my childhood and so much of those teenage years, just so disgustingly uncomfortable in my skin, and just riddled with so much anxiety that I almost felt like I lived in a disassociated state.”
DeAraugo, who says battles with body image and self-confidence drove an addictive, unhealthy relationship with both food and romance throughout her early life, believes she had all the components of “an addict” long before she ever touched drugs.
“I can tell you that I was on Australian Idol and I can tell you that I won and I could tell you I’ve done lots of incredible things, but I don’t necessarily remember it,” she says.
“It saddens me to say that, but they’re just not memories that I have.”
Nevertheless, after releasing platinum single Maybe Tonight and joining pop group The Young Divas, it looked for a while as though DeAraugo’s star was going to rise above the self-doubt she’d been plagued with.
“I wasn’t very good at being famous,” she admits, explaining that with more money and fame came access to cocaine for the first time in her life – something she describes as “an instant obsession”.
“It was not a slow burn for me,” she says. “I’d met this thing and it became my everything and I didn’t know how to go to any kind of social thing without drugs on me. without cocaine.”
“It wasn’t ever one or two lines, it was one or two bags and it was as much as I could get, until I couldn’t find any more, always.”
After her music career began to suffer and she became more and more dependent on drugs and alcohol, DeAraugo’s family tried to intervene. In an effort to change her situation, the musician took a radio gig on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, believing a change of scenery might do her good.
Unfortunately, it was here she became hooked on methamphetamine – commonly referred to as “ice”.
“I’m in a town I don’t know, and in the middle of the night, I jump in a car with a person I don’t know,” she recalls. “It was madness. I could tell that he was on something. And I just said, ‘I don’t know what you have, but you need to give me some’. And that was it.”
Deep in the grips of an ice addiction, DeAraugo’s problem quickly went public when she was arrested and charged for driving under the influence of drugs.
“The headlines came out, and I lost any sliver of respect I still had in the industry,” she says.
“That was it.”
For most people, it would be rock bottom. For DeAraugo, it was a permission slip.
“To normal people, that would have been enough [to set them straight],” she says, “but to me that was the ticket that my addiction needed to go, ‘right, you all think I’m a junkie anyway so I’m just gonna take off here, and I’m gonna show you what it’s really like’. And I guess it just gave me the permission to use the way that I’d been wanting to use for years, which was that I didn’t need to hide it anymore.”
From here, life got a lot darker, quickly.
“I went from that life [of fame], to living in shooting galleries or wherever I could find a bed,” she says.
“My consequential thinking was gone, and I found myself in a lot of dangerous places with a lot of dangerous people doing a lot of dangerous things really, really quickly.
“I think that’s what ice does, quicker than anything else, because it’s all good and well, when you’ve got the money and you can afford it,” DeAraugo continues.
“There are no drugs I haven’t tried, I’ve done them all. But I’ve never felt the desperation and drive to need to continue to use a drug like methamphetamine. Never. It just possesses you like nothing I could explain.
“I very quickly would just do whatever I needed to do to get what I needed to get. And there were no boundaries to that. So use your imagination, I guess, to work out what that looks like.”
Even more dangerous than the drug use were the people DeAraugo had in her life. In particular, she details a violent relationship with a fellow user, which escalated to her being stabbed with a machete.
“I’ve been addicted to all kinds of things, and love is no different. And I was a crazy love addict. And you know, I would fall in love instantly with the most toxic of humans. And, you know, I’ve done that a lot over the years, and he was no different, and I met him in a really dark moment, I had no money and no drugs, and he walked in and essentially we just became joined at the hip then and there.
“He stabbed me in my left hip one day, with a machete,” she says, adding that because of the delusional state she was in, she colluded with him to fabricate a story about how the injury had occurred on the way to the hospital, telling staff she’d fallen on a piece of tin.
“I think they sent him away to go take a picture of the piece of tin, and he went and threw away the machete, and that was the end of that,” she continues. “They asked me if I needed help, and I said, ‘no, what? You’re being ridiculous’ and got out the next day and carried on.”
Despite the horror of some of her experiences, it was a quiet moment alone that finally convinced DeAraugo she needed help.
“I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and ... I was bone thin, my face was messed up, and I was alone,” she says.
“I looked at myself and thought, ‘who are you?’ Call it a moment of sanity or divine intervention, but I knew if things didn’t change, I was going to die.
“This was the first time I called and said, ‘Mum, I need you to come and get me. I’m going to die and I need help’.”
Despite having tried rehab at various times in the past, there was something different about this last time, she says.
The ex-TV star checked into a facility, where she describes the six weeks of detox as a painful, terrifying experience, as she was forced to face all the shame, guilt and resentment she had been avoiding for years. This was the turning point where she began to take responsibility for her life and started on the path to recovery – which she maintains to this day.
Now in a committed relationship with her long-term partner, Shannon Riseley, DeAraugo is a mother of two, works in the construction industry and hosts a podcast titled Why Do I Feel This Way, a platform she uses to share her own struggles and inspire others.
Her overarching message to anyone struggling with addiction is that there is hope for a different kind of life, no matter how hopeless things might feel right now.
“I’ve met people in my recovery that have been way further down the rabbit hole, than I was,” she says, “and they live beautiful, full, rich lives, free from all of that chaos. And the message in it, for me, is that it can happen to anyone – anyone can find themselves where I did. This doesn’t discriminate.
“But,” she adds, “it doesn’t matter how far down you go, as long as you’ve still got two feet on the ground. I promise you can do it. It’s pretty simple, but it’s not easy. It’s doable, and a life beyond your wildest dreams is waiting for you, if you just take the first step.”
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