After recently flaunting her ninth engagement ring, Katie Price was last week accused of attempting to morph her new fiancé, JJ Slater, into her ex of four years, Essex car dealer Carl Woods.
Complete with a new set of teeth and blond highlights, there’s no doubt that MAFS star JJ, 31, is gradually becoming the image of Ken-doll lookalike Carl, who Katie previously bragged was "the best looking person I’ve been out with, or perhaps ever seen".
And when Closer sits down for a chat with Carl – eight months on from their final break-up on Christmas Day last year – he warns JJ that he could be the next in a long line of Katie’s exes who have ‘walked the same path’, only to be cast aside when they reach the end of their ‘shelf-life’.
He says, "She won’t ever be happy with anyone. I would like to say she’d be happy with JJ… but unfortunately you always have a shelf life.
"I see the pattern and I see that he’s doing exactly what I was doing, and I was doing exactly what [Katie’s previous ex] Kris Boyson was doing, exactly what Kieran [Hayler] had done. We’ve all walked the same path."
Carl adds, "I think a lot of it stems from boredom. For her, it’s all brand new and shiny and exciting, and then she gets bored and is looking for the next thrill. I’m a very strong person and she made absolute mincemeat of me. So if she does the same, that poor f***er hasn’t got a chance. We talk about cheating but this is just how life is when you’re with her. She’ll never stop."
Carl, 35, and Katie, 45, were on and off for four years before he finally walked out on their relationship last December.
They first met through mutual friends in 2020, before announcing their engagement 10 months later in 2021. However, their relationship hit a rocky patch when Carl later accused Katie of cheating on him with a ‘former England player’ during a drunken night out the following year.
Carl – who was accused of using threatening behaviour towards Katie in 2022, though the charge was later dropped – adds, "I knew she’d cheated on me and she had admitted it." He claims, "There were a lot more men than she had to admit to. I would catch her cheating and I was so madly in love with her, I would always want to believe everything she was saying."
Looking back on their relationship, Carl now believes Katie – who was previously married to Peter Andre (2005-2009), Alex Reid (2010-2012) and Kieran Hayler (2013-2021) – just ‘loves being married’ and says he was just the latest of many on a conveyor belt of fiancés that have fallen for the former glamour model and reality star.
"Katie loves to be married, she loves to have her latest accessory on her arm," he says. "I was so blind. For her, she was just walking down a path she’s walked down a million times. Katie likes to get married, she just doesn’t care who it is to. She just loves a party."
In an unlikely turn of events, Carl says it was Katie’s ex-husband Kieran, who she split from in 2018 following his affairs with two of her close friends, who reached out to him during his darkest times with her. The pair have since been pictured together and Carl says they have formed an unlikely friendship. He says, "Kieran is a good guy and a very good dad. He reached out to me and said, 'Listen, you need somebody who has been through this. Nobody else will understand'".
Carl, who no longer speaks to Katie, says he also grew close to her children – Harvey, 21, with ex Dwight Yorke, Junior, 19, and Princess, 17, who she shares with first husband Peter and Jett, 11, and Bunny, 10, with Kieran – and hopes her relationship with JJ will last to give them stability.
He says, "It’s not nice for them to have a new man in their home every five minutes. For their sakes, I hope there is some stability there."
And he warns JJ – who is 14 years younger than Katie – that the mum-of-five could soon move on to someone even younger.
"Soon she’ll be dating lads that are Junior’s age – he’ll be 25 in a few years. Psychologically, Katie still thinks she’s young and she wants to prove she can still get all the young men. She gets a thrill out of it," he says.
And while Carl says he doesn’t believe that Katie – who has said she wants to look like a ‘Bratz doll’ – is addicted to surgery, he says she’s unlikely to stop due to her obsession with looking younger.
He says, "I thought she was very attractive when I got with her, but I think she’s ruined herself now. She could grow old gracefully, but she won’t and that’s her prerogative. She will constantly do this to herself because she’s chasing her youth and she loves the attention and the shock factor.
"It’s what she wants to do, but I got bored of being in the Katie Price Show."