Kelly Brook has reflected on the heartbreaking moment she lost her baby when she was six months pregnant.
The presenter, 45, who is due to enter the I’m A Celebrity jungle, fell pregnant in 2011, while with former fiancé and Scottish rugby player Thom Evans.
Speaking on the How To Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast, Kelly said the ‘horrific’ loss was so scarring, it left her never wanting to try for a baby again.
She said: ‘In my thirties, I got pregnant and it was with somebody that I hadn’t been with for very long, and it was really a case of like, “well, I’m in my thirties. This might be my last roll of the dice. Maybe I should just do this.
‘He’s a nice guy, maybe this is it. Maybe it’s that whole taxi light thing goes off and this is what we’re going to do”.
Kelly said Thom really wanted to have a baby and that she while she was initially hesitant about becoming mother due to her own relationship with her mum, she was soon excited.
She continued: ‘Lo and behold I had a miscarriage at six months, which was the most traumatic, horrific thing that I’ve ever been through. It was just the most devastating thing.
‘It took me quite a long time for my body and for everything to kind of, I don’t think you ever fully recover from that, but our relationship didn’t survive that and I just had to pick myself back up and just move forward.’
Kelly was in a relationship with Thom, 40, for two years before they split in 2013.
The model met her Jeremy Parisi, 40, in 2015 and they married in 2022, while Thom is engaged to Nicole Scherzinger.
The couple met in 2019 on Celebrity X Factor, where Nicole was a judge and Thom was part of a boyband.
Kelly said she is so ‘traumatised’, she never wants to go through falling pregnant again.
She added: ‘I just thought, “it’s not in my world, I just don’t want to go through that again”.’
Kelly said she went through the birth of her baby as she didn’t want any medical intervention.
The presenter said to process her grief, she decided not to name her baby.
She told Elizabeth: ‘I didn’t have a name, and at that point I didn’t want to have a name.
‘So it’s just a way of me coping and I know so many women deal with this in so many different ways, and I was told that I would regret that and I should really have a name and I should have footprints and all of these hand prints and all of these things and I just chose not to.
‘At the time, miscarriage wasn’t something we talked about. It really wasn’t something we talked about.
‘It was something that you hid away. It felt like you’d failed. It was very shameful.’
Kelly said out of respect for Jeremy, she treats the loss like a miscarriage.
She said: ‘Even though it was more than that, I have to treat it like a miscarriage because it’s the only way I can cope because I just don’t know how I could get through every day if I didn’t.’
Kelly added she felt guilty she didn’t act the same as others who had gone through the same, deciding not to mark the occasion every year or give her baby a name.
She said: ‘I’d see women in the public eye and they did have names for their babies and they do mark the occasion every year and they do this and I don’t do that.
‘I felt like, “is there something wrong with me? Is there something missing? Do I not have empathy? Is there nothing inside?”
‘And it’s actually nothing to do with that because I’m still here and I’ve got to face every day and get through every day. I have to do what I have to do to get through every day.’
Elizabeth told her: ‘I’m so sorry for you and I’m so struck by that phrase that it was something you and the baby had to go through together and that for me makes you a mother.
‘There are so many different ways to mother and parent in this world, and that’s how you show up.
‘There’s so much misplaced shame that women carry that you’ve expressed so powerfully there. I’m really sorry that you had to deal with that as well and you are right, it wasn’t spoken about very much at all.’
