Jodie Marsh was the pioneer of wearing a belt as a bra – a trend that unsurprisingly didn’t catch on.
But back in the noughties she was also one of the highest paid Page 3 models, making a wedge of cash by talking about sex and beefing with rival Katie Price.
But growing up, Jodie, 41, was far from the brash, scantily-clad lads’ mag star she became.
In fact, she was a well-to-do, privately educated, straight A student raised in a sprawling mansion with its own swimming pool.
She might have been a straight A student, but Jodie was still confused about the correct use of a belt (Image: Rex)
Her millionaire parents John Marsh and mum Kristina made their money in the scaffolding business and raised Jodie in a countryside listed Tudor-style mansion near the exclusive village of Brentwood, Essex.
With dreams of becoming a vet or a lawyer, the studious Jodie attended the £10,000-a-year private Brentwood School where she scored 11 GCSEs at A and B grades, plus three straight As in her A-levels.
But while hers was a life of privilege, her school years were desperately unhappy thanks to merciless bullies who honed in on her thick glasses and broken nose, which she injured in a hockey accident.
Jodie was a studious pupil at her £10,000-a-year private school (Image: JodieMarsh/Twitter)
In Channel 5 documentary, Bullied: My Secret Past, she told how her tormentors would kick footballs at her head and leave her cowering in the library at lunch, desperate to stay hidden.
At one point, the situation was so dire that Jodie even contemplated suicide.
“My bullying at school changed my life,” she once told The Morning.
“After I broke my nose in a hockey accident, they started picking on my nose and then I got called ugly and big nose, dodgy nose and all sorts of things right the way through secondary school.
Jodie and her dad are extremely close (Image: jodiemarshtv/Instagram)
“By the end of my time secondary school I didn’t have a single friend there. I was a complete loner at school.
“I contemplated suicide loads of times.”
Despite her academic achievements, at 15 Jodie hatched a plan to ‘prove her bullies wrong’ – she was going to be a model instead.
She added: “I only do what I do now because of being bullied. I decided to become a model to prove to my bullies that I wasn’t ugly.”
Fame came calling when Jodie appeared on ITV’s reality TV show, Essex Wives, by which point she was working as a pole dancer for Stringfellows and living in a house her dad had build for her in the grounds of his estate.
Jodie’s family home is epic (Image: jodiemarshtv/Instagram)
Her mum Kris was seen talking about how accepting she was of her daughter’s job and very quickly offers of Page 3 came rolling in.
“People found it fascinating,” Jodie told ESPN of her story.
“My mum and dad have their own scaffolding business, and they had all of this money and houses, and I was a lap dancer. I wanted to earn my own money. It was good money at the time, about 10,000 pounds a week in cash.”
As for whether she would have done things differently if she’d not been bullied, Jodie has insisted she wouldn’t change a thing.
She told the Guardian: “I could’ve been a lawyer by now, I could’ve gone to uni. But I’ve taken the quickest and easiest route to making as much money as I can, and having as much fun as I can, and I don’t regret that.”
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
