Gareth Gates says 17-year-old romance with Katie Price felt exposed

gareth gates says he was “not even an adult” when a brief 2002 relationship with Katie Price became public property. He says he was shocked when Price told the world they had slept together, and that the fallout changed how he dealt with trust early in his career.

Price and Gates in 2002

Gates was 17 when he placed second on the first series of Pop Idol in early 2002, then entered a brief relationship with Price a matter of months later. On the Great Company with Jamie Laing podcast, he said, “I haven't ever spoken about relationships. I believe that relationships are between two people and I couldn't believe that somebody else was selling stories about very, very intimate details. I was shocked. But I learned a lot about the industry, and trust. I would never have done that to her or anybody else. It was a real learning curve for me.”

He added, “It was a shame because she's a really, really lovely girl but I couldn't believe that somebody could do that. I became very wary of trusting people after that because that was such a big thing, on a massive, massive scale.” For Gates, the issue was not just the relationship itself but how quickly it became the main thing everyone wanted to know about.

Jamie Laing podcast comments

Gates said, “It was everywhere. It became the main thing that everyone wanted to know about. It was a shame I had to talk about it when I just wanted to be an artist. That was tough. It made me extremely wary.” He framed the experience as an early lesson in how celebrity stories can move beyond the people living them and into a market for intimate detail.

He was blunter about the age gap in maturity than any of the tabloid-era framing around the romance: “You become very careful about what you text people, what you say to people, and if you're a single man, I was a boy at the time - I wasn't even an adult - you become very wary about what you say to people because you're thinking 'They could sell this.' It was tough times, I was so young. This all happened before I was 18 even.”

Katie Price on the fling

Price had previously defended the relationship on the Anything Goes with James English podcast, where she said, “What about the thing with Gareth Gates?” and then, “Yeah I took his virginity when I was six months pregnant.” She followed that with, “Well you’re asking me! What you looking at? Just because I was pregnant don’t say I can’t have a boyfriend.”

The sharper point for Gates is that the story was not just public; it was specific, intimate and, by his account, sold at a scale that shaped how he treated people afterward. Two decades later, he is still describing the aftershock as a trust lesson rather than a celebrity anecdote, and that makes the story feel less like old gossip than a career-defining warning about who gets to own the narrative.