Grim truth behind Kate DeAraugo’s triumphant 2005 Australian Idol win

Two million people watched a beaming Kate DeAraugo crowned winner in 2005 – a moment which went on to fuel a horrifying period in her life.

With two million people tuning in on TV to watch Kate DeAraugo declared winner of Australian Idol in 2005, it should have marked the beginning of a glittering new chapter.

Instead, her triumph – and the money that came with it – would eventually pour lighter fluid on her escalating, private battle with drug addiction.

“I was able to support quite a big habit quite quickly,” DeAraugo, 37, told 9 Honey.

What followed on from her Idol stardom was eight horrifying years of addiction, arrests, and violence as she struggled to get on top of the disease.

DeAraugo, who has been sober now for six years, reveals all the harrowing details of that turbulent period in her new podcast series, Why Do I Feel This Way?, which launched its first episode on Tuesday.

DeAraugo won Australian Idol in 2005.

Pictured at Bendigo Magistrates Court in 2017. Picture: Rob Leeson.

The singer explained that her almost decade-long battle with drug abuse began around the age of 20, when – finally feeling like she “fit in” and was “in with the cool kids” – she tried cocaine.

After that, she moved on to the “awful, awful drug” of nitrous oxide before trying methamphetamine, or “ice”, for the first time during a road trip from Airlie Beach to Mackay with a friend in 2009.

“He pulled out a pipe and a bag of meth. And that was it. It was the first time I tried meth and I became an everyday user for the next seven years,” DeAraugo said, according to VWeekend.

In 2015, DeAraugo was charged with drug driving; then in 2017 came a drugs and weapons conviction after ice, a knife and a tomahawk were found in her car.

She has since turned her life around and is a mother to son, Hudson. Picture: Supplied

“In the back of my mind, it was a story I told myself … ‘I’m not an addict. I don’t end up in these places. I come from a good home’,” she explained.

“But this sh** doesn’t give a f**k who you are. It doesn’t care where you came from, who your mummies or daddies are, or what school you went to.”

DeAraugo added that she had a “million shocking stories” about “where, how and what” she used.

“But the difference in this situation was what happened on the inside. It was a slow-burning emotional death. I’d lost everything – my career, beautiful relationships, friends, all my money,” she said.

“I’d lost all hope. I didn’t want to live anymore but, to be honest, I was too gutless to die.”

DeAraugo has since managed to turn her life around, and even welcomed her first child, a baby boy named Hudson, with her partner Shannon Riseley last December.

Originally published as Grim truth behind Kate DeAraugo’s triumphant 2005 Australian Idol win