Kate DeAraugo reveals truth behind Kyle Sandilands’ infamous Australian Idol comment

2005 Idol winner Kate DeAraugo shared her bizarre secret conversation with Kyle Sandilands in the wake of his “tuck shop lady arms” remark.

Kate DeAraugo has lifted the lid on Kyle Sandilands’ unexpected, off-camera confession in the moments after he infamously called out her “tuckshop lady arms” on Australian Idol.

The reality TV judge sparked outrage everywhere back in 2005 when he made the fat-shaming comment about the show’s eventual winner, then 18, after she opted to wear a sleeveless top during a performance.

Addressing the controversial moment on her new podcast, Why Do I Feel This Way?, DeAraugo, 38, revealed for the first time the bizarre excuse the radio star had privately given her afterwards.

“The bit that nobody knows is that after that show was finished and we were all backstage, Kyle came up to me and said, ‘I’m really sorry about that comment, but you sang like s**t and I didn’t want you to get voted off, so I just threw that comment out to get a sympathy vote’,” DeAraugo told co-host Claudia Coy.

DeAraugo ended up winning Idol in 2005. Picture: AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy

Sandilands was a judge on the series at the time.

Despite his reasoning, DeAraugo pointed out that the remark had scarred her.

“Whatever reason he said it is irrelevant – I guess the message in that is that you have to be really careful about what you say about people’s bodies,” she said.

“It can really scar and damage somebody. On a subconscious level, that comment never really left me.”

She added that she’d never again worn a sleeveless top, and that she hadn’t even felt rage at the time, just the grim acceptance that Sandilands confirmed her worst fears about her body.

“I don’t think I was ever angry enough to have to forgive him in the first place, which is wrong in itself,” DeAraugo said.

She then went into detail about the painful, full-body liposuction she had after the show, which left her “black and blue” and with around 30 incisions.

DeAraugo, pictured here with runner-up Emily Williams, had full-body liposuction not long after the finale. Picture: AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy

The singer and former reality TV star has also opened up in her podcast about her lengthy battle with drug addiction, which escalated in the years following her Idol win.

DeAraugo 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.

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.

“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.

“ … 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 after becoming sober six years ago, and is now mum to an almost-one-year-old boy with partner Shannon Riseley.

Originally published as Kate DeAraugo reveals truth behind Kyle Sandilands’ infamous Australian Idol comment