Tziporah Malkah reveals details about ‘compensation’ during split from James Packer

TZIPORAH Malkah has told The Project her life as Kate Fischer was perfect before her world came crashing down.

“I WAS pretty numb, I was in a lot of shock.”

That’s the way Tziporah Malkah described her fall from Hollywood starlet to living on the fringes in a women’s shelter in Melbourne.

Talking to The Project on Wednesday night, the former actress revealed how she went from being a sought-after teen model millionaire to ending up homeless.

“I just sat down on my bed and wept,” Malkah, formerly Kate Fischer, said. “I’d tumbled from a great height.”

Malkah, now appearing on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, explained how she had forged a successful modelling career from age 13, appearing on the cover of Vogue numerous times. But her career — which took her to New York and Hollywood — went south when she became engaged to the heir of a business empire, James Packer.

She said she “hates talking about him” but wants to clear the air about the pair’s relationship.

“I hate being defined by him. I felt like I was a bud snapped off the vine before I had the chance to bloom. That’s fine, you make sacrifices for love.”

Malkah told host Carrie Bickmore that Packer told her she had to stop working because “you’re going to be my wife and it’s tacky that you need to work”.

“I just went shopping and had coffees with friends. He was under so much pressure and so much stress. He would sometimes come home and not talk to me.”

Kate Kischer aka Tziporah Malkah and James Packer. Picture: Australscope

She said when things went wrong between them, the billionaire businessman’s closest friends “turned on” her and within six months she was out of the loop.

The 42-year-old used the interview to clear up confusion around compensation she received, money she said Packer’s friends and family deemed “ill-gotten”.

“I looked like this horrible woman who’d run off with the Packer money,” she said.

“He didn’t give me $10 million (as some had reported). James paid a million dollars for a house and we lived in it for two years and he said: ‘You can keep it’.

“So I kept the house and he gave me a few hundred thousand dollars.”

With that, she said the tabloids turned on her, forcing her to flee the country. She worked in Hollywood for a time before meeting a man and falling in love again. But when he offered to invest her savings she lost it all.

“Because we were in love and supposed to get married I said ‘OK’ and just gave it to him. It turns out he had this wife and child and he just took it.”

That’s when she moved back to Melbourne and into a shelter. She said she hid as best she could, terrified she would be identified.

Self-described Trump fan. Picture: Instagram

Kate Fischer in 1998.

“I stayed in a motel for a little while. I Googled ‘homelessness Melbourne’. Even though I’d dropped out of show business eight years earlier, people still recognised me. I felt so ashamed. I thought: ‘How am I going to explain this to anybody?’”

The interview touched on topics including her childhood and her mother, politician Pru Goward. She said the pair are no longer in touch.

“I respect my mother. I understand my mother, but she’s not motherly.”

She also talked about the photos of her on her front lawn wearing a bed sheet. The images, captured by a photographer for gossip magazine Woman’s Day, thrust her back into the spotlight.

“Apparently (the photographer) stalked me for nine weeks,” Malkah told The Project.

“I’ve only got three outfits. My work uniform, my pair of jeans (and my black dress). Suddenly, one day I go to the mailbox and there it is. A sheet. The money shot.

“I think it was intended to be humiliating.”

Her plan now is to recover from the humiliation. She says she’s on her way.

“I was a princess in an ivory tower. I didn’t see it. It didn’t occur to me what it’s like to really, really suffer. Since I’ve had this experience, it’s really made me want to come back.”

It wasn’t the only emotional confession made by Malkah this week: on last night’s episode of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, she opened up about developing a “chronic eating disorder” at the age of eight.

She shared the information during a conversation about her current weight battle.

“I won’t eat for two or three days and then I will eat a whole pizza,” she said.

Malkah then said her current issues with nutrition reach back to her childhood.

“I have had an eating disorder since I was eight-years-old,” she said. “I don’t have a healthy relationship with food. Since I was eight and I am 43. I have never eaten healthy within the 35 years. It has been a lifelong condition.

Malkah said her “overeating” began when her parents separated, and it soon turned into a habit that was “difficult to kick”.

“Then I started to not eat and then I got bulimia and all that kind of stuff. By the time I started modelling at 13 I had already had a chronic eating disorder for five years.”