Kate partied with celebs and lived the Bondi dream. Then she vanished from work, and a worried friend climbed her fence to discover how far her drinking had spiralled

By the time one of Kate Forrester’s friends climbed over the fence of her Byron Bay home to find her, Kate had already stopped turning up to work.

She was 28 and working for a fashion group, another job in a career she had been building since she was 16. But her drinking, once largely confined to big nights out, had crept into the rest of her life. She was drinking alone, then every night, and eventually, she says, ’24/7′.

This time, her friend was worried enough to come looking for her.

What happened next would end with Kate being driven to rehab by her dad.

It was a long way from the life she had spent her twenties building. Kate had worked in fashion and PR with names including Chanel, Tiffany & Co, Camilla and Diesel. She had moved from Melbourne to Sydney, lived in Bondi, gone to the parties and mixed with celebrities.

And before any of that, there was a little girl in Melbourne who loved dressing up, performing and that fuzzy feeling that came with collecting gold stars.

‘If you do well, everyone thinks you’re doing well’

Growing up in Melbourne, Kate was expressive and creative. She loved drama, dressing up and performing.

She was also anxious and eager for approval. At the private girls’ school she attended, Kate found reassurance in something she could measure: marks. She studied relentlessly and did well, although looking back, she wonders how much she was actually learning.

‘I was just trying to memorise everything to get the result,’ Kate tells Daily Mail. ‘If you do well in school, everyone thinks you’re doing well.’

Kate loved the school at the time. It suited her. There were expectations to meet and boxes she knew how to tick.

By 16, she had found another world that appealed to a different side of her. Her first taste of the fashion industry came through an internship at Melbourne Fashion Festival, where much of the job involved stuffing envelopes.

It hardly mattered. Kate loved the colour, the clothes, the people and the energy of it. Fashion felt exciting, and she wanted in.

‘I was always the one who took it too far’

Alcohol had entered Kate’s life a couple of years earlier, when she and her friends started drinking at parties in high school.

Even then, there was a difference in the way Kate drank. While her friends might have a couple of lemon Stollies, she remembers drinking a bottle of champagne and blacking out.

‘I was always that girl,’ she says. ‘I was always the girl at the parties who was drinking too much. I was always the one who was drunk straight away, throwing up.’

Around the same age, food and weight were beginning to occupy more space in her world. Kate remembers girls at school experimenting with restricting what they ate and bulimia. She had started going to the gym at 15 and, before long, some of those behaviours would become part of her life too.

At 18, Kate got the marks she had worked so hard for and a place at the University of Melbourne. Then she arrived and realised she had no idea why she was there.

‘My whole goal was to get the marks to go into Melbourne Uni,’ she says. ‘It had nothing to do with what I wanted.’

She left after about a semester and took a job at fashion retailer Review, where she found a team she liked and discovered she was very good at sales.

Around the same time, her relationship with food became increasingly difficult. Kate says she stopped eating and describes herself as anorexic for about a year. As she lost weight, the response from other people only reinforced what she was doing.

‘What happened, unfortunately, was that I got really hot,’ she laughs. ‘I was going to all the cool parties and every boy wanted me.’

Eventually, she could no longer maintain the restriction. Drinking became tangled up with bingeing and purging. She would try not to eat, then drink to get the calories she needed, lose the food control she had been trying so hard to maintain, and binge and purge.

Before long, she was drinking, eating and purging every night.

‘It was amazing and horrific’

As her drinking became more entrenched, Kate’s career was taking off.

She landed a job at a boutique PR agency in Melbourne, working on accounts including Chanel, Tiffany & Co and Salvatore Ferragamo, before moving to Sydney and throwing herself into the fashion scene there.

There were jobs with Diesel and Camilla, a life in Bondi, parties with the MTV crowd and celebrities passing through the showroom.

‘I was taking big risks,’ she says. ‘I was like, “I’m going to go move to Sydney. I’m going to meet all these different people, throw myself into different worlds and different experiences and learn and grow.”‘

And Kate genuinely loved so much of it. She loved the people, the creativity and the pace. She was ambitious and good at what she did, and she wanted to be in the middle of it all.

But she remembers those years as both ‘amazing and horrific’.

The fashion and PR industry Kate entered in her twenties could also be an unforgiving place to work. Twelve-hour days were normal, she says. She remembers people being told not to eat, being called fat and having things thrown at them by bosses.

Drugs and alcohol were readily available, and the lines between working, partying and drinking could be blurry.

‘There were the worst cultures you could imagine,’ Kate says.

Heavy drinking hardly made Kate stand out. As she remembers it, ‘all of us binge drank’, while extreme attitudes towards food and thinness existed in the workplace too.

Kate is careful to say the industry has changed since then. But at the time, she was able to live inside that culture and keep succeeding professionally, even as things were becoming increasingly chaotic elsewhere in her life.

‘I was a very functional person,’ she says. ‘I was still this high performer and high achiever.’

For a long time, whatever happened at night, Kate could still turn up the next morning and do her job well. Then, gradually, that started to change.

Her drinking had moved well beyond big nights out. She was drinking alone at home, then every night and eventually during the day too. The promises she made to herself each morning became harder to keep.

‘I’d be like, “Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it”,’ and then I would do it,’ she says.

She went to therapy and tried repeatedly to stop, but still resisted the idea that she was an alcoholic.

‘I would talk to myself all the time: ‘I’m not an alcoholic. I’m not an alcoholic,’ she says.

As drinking took up more of her days, work was no longer untouched by it. Kate started not turning up.

‘I didn’t want to go’

It didn’t happen just once.

‘I’d go through this stage of repairing my life and picking up the pieces and trying again,’ she says.

But when it happened again while Kate was living in Byron, one of her friends became worried enough to come looking for her.

Her friend climbed the fence of Kate’s home and found her inside.

The friend called Kate’s parents, who came to Byron. Kate went to see her GP, who recommended rehab.

Her family had tried to help before. Kate says she simply hadn’t been ready to hear them.

‘I just needed to get there on my own,’ she says.

This time, she had. Kate’s dad drove her to rehab.

‘I didn’t want to go,’ she says. ‘And then when I got there, I didn’t want to leave.’

The first night was another matter.

‘It was f**ked. I hated it. It was horrible.’

Kate remembers listening to music and crying. A relationship had ended about a year earlier and, without alcohol to push everything away, grief she hadn’t dealt with began to surface.

‘I hadn’t grieved anything for 10 years because I was always medicating myself,’ she says.

There was no great revelation that suddenly changed everything. In fact, much of those early days was strikingly ordinary. Kate slept. She ate. She went for walks. She became close to two other women in rehab.

And she stopped drinking.

Slowly, she began to feel better.

Kate describes the first months of recovery as a ‘pink cloud’, a term she encountered through 12-step. Food tasted incredible. The world seemed almost technicolour.

For a while, being sober felt amazing. But as the months passed, the feelings and problems she had spent years drinking over were still there.

‘All the shit that you’ve covered up with alcohol starts to come up,’ Kate says. ‘That’s when the work kind of starts.’

‘Who was I?’

Leaving rehab was only the beginning.

Kate stayed in Byron for a time and went to 12-step meetings and therapy. Once alcohol was no longer consuming her days, there were other things to deal with, including her relationship with food and the parts of herself she was only beginning to understand.

Recovery, as Kate describes it now, happened in ‘levels and layers’. Over the next few years she travelled, practised yoga and kept trying to understand why she had spent so much of her life needing to numb herself.

Stopping drinking was one part of it. It hadn’t answered a much bigger question about who Kate was without all the things she had used to define herself.

At around 30, that question became impossible to avoid. Kate moved back to Melbourne and into her parents’ home. She wasn’t working. She was on Centrelink and no longer in a relationship.

She remembers walking around Melbourne crying.

‘If I wasn’t in a relationship, I was living with my family, I was on Centrelink and I wasn’t working, who was I?’ she says.

For most of her life, there had always been something she could point to. Good marks. A good job. A career that sounded impressive when she talked about it. Without those things, Kate began to see just how much of her identity had been wrapped up in them.

‘I didn’t realise how attached I was to my work and my career,’ she says. ‘I thought my problem was addiction and all the other stuff that sits on the surface.’

The ambition that had driven Kate through school and into fashion never disappeared. She eventually returned to work and later started her own marketing business, kafandco.

Around 2019, she met the man who would become her partner. They travelled through Europe together and fell in love, then returned home before COVID. Kate became pregnant with their first child. Today, they have four children.

Her business grew too. Kate says kafandco has reached $250,000 months in profit, while some of the brands she works with have grown to $2 million months.

But when I ask whether the drive that once pushed her so relentlessly has changed, Kate doesn’t hesitate.

‘Same drive,’ she says.

What has changed, she says, are the foundations underneath it. The things that once disappeared when everything else took over are now non-negotiable.

‘I sleep, I eat.’

Motherhood changed things too. With four children, there are people who need Kate to be present and available.

‘I had to relearn how to do everything,’ she says of the years since rehab.

Asked what the 28-year-old being driven to rehab by her dad would think if she could see her life now, Kate laughs.

‘Woohoo,’ she says. ‘That’s what I wanted.’

Back then, people had tried to tell her there was another way to have the life she wanted, but Kate couldn’t see it.

‘I thought that was the only way to get what I wanted,’ she says. ‘And now I’ve done it the other way, in a different way.’