Katie Hopkins
| Katie Hopkins | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Katie Olivia Hopkins 13 February 1975 Barnstaple, Devon, England |
| Alma mater |
University of Exeter Royal Military Academy Sandhurst |
| Occupation | Television personality, columnist, radio presenter |
| Television |
The Apprentice I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! Celebrity Big Brother If Katie Hopkins Ruled the World |
| Spouse(s) |
Damian McKinney (m. 2004–05) Mark Cross (m. 2010) |
| Children | 3 |
Katie Olivia Hopkins (born 13 February 1975) is an English television personality and newspaper columnist. She first came to prominence in 2007 as a contestant on reality television series The Apprentice and is now best known as a columnist for British newspapers The Sun and the Daily Mail. She also stood as a candidate in the 2009 European Parliamentary election.
Hopkins has been criticised in the media and by advocacy groups and politicians for her comments about migrants, and accused of classism and racism. In 2016, Mail Online was forced to pay £150,000 to a Muslim family whom Hopkins had falsely accused of extremist links; and in a high profile 2017 libel case, Hopkins was personally required to pay £24,000 in damages and £107,000 in legal costs to Jack Monroe after making defamatory remarks on Twitter.
Hopkins has been characterised by several media outlets as a "professional troll". She describes herself as "pushing back the walls closing in on freedom of speech".
Katie Hopkins was born on 13 February 1975, in Barnstaple, Devon. Her father was an electrical engineer and she has an older sister. She was raised in Bideford, attended a private convent school from age 3 to 16, played sports and learned to play the piano and violin. As a child she believed: "I was going to be the colonel of the forces. I loved the military. I loved the discipline, the rigour, the big shouty men".
Hopkins told Sathnam Sanghera of The Times in June 2015 that she applied to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Magdalen College, Oxford. She passed the Oxford University entrance exam, but was rejected at the interview stage. "Massively" disappointed, and putting the failure down to an absence of "a bit of coaching", she instead studied economics at the University of Exeter. She felt that her time at university was "redeemed" by her sponsorship from the British Army's Intelligence Corps, which would normally lead to a contracted 35-year period of employment, and spent her weekends with the Territorial Army. This she found "really fun, lying around in forests with guns having a brilliant time".
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