Kate DeAraugo topped off 2025 with an engagement to her long-term partner, Shannon Riseley.
“What an incredible year 2025 was — and to finish it with this… well, what can I say? It doesn’t get any better,” she posted on Instagram this week. “I Love you @shan_riseley x.”
Kate first rose to fame when she was crowned the third winner of Australian Idol in 2005.
Her debut single ‘Maybe Tonight’ and the debut album that followed, A Place I’ve Never Been, went platinum.
But just as her career started to skyrocket, she turned to drugs and alcohol to dull the pain of a lifetime of insecurity about her body image, which was only made worse when Idol judge Kyle Sandilands made a comment about her “tuck shop lady arms” after she wore a sleeveless dress during a live performance.
“I didn’t use drugs until after I won Idol,” Kate exclusively told Woman’s Day last year.
“I’ve been fat shamed my entire life,” she continued. “Yes, I’m the tuck shop girl! I was just 19 when Kyle said that. That was just one of many, many episodes of me feeling shameful about my body. Sadly, I’ve been shamed in a public space for my body forever.”
Kate said the crippling insecurity about her body led to her turning to cocaine, alcohol, nitrite oxide and eventually ice.
Appearing on Gary Jubelin’s I Catch Killers podcast last year, Kate reflected on her “instant obsession” with cocaine.
“It wasn’t ever one or two lines, it was one or two bags and it was as much as I could get, until I couldn’t find anymore, always,” she said.
After she moved to the Sunshine Coast in hopes of starting fresh, she discovered ice.
“I’m in a town I don’t know, and in the middle of the night, I jump in a car with a person I don’t know,” she said.
“It was madness. I could tell that he was on something. And I just said, ‘I don’t know what you have, but you need to give me some’. And that was it.”
Over the years she tried every diet, underwent extreme liposuction, secretly attended a Muay Thai martial arts camp in Thailand and had a gastric sleeve operation.
On March 26, 2018, the now 40-year-old checked into a rehab facility and she hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol or an illegal drug since.
After the six-week rehab stint, she spent another two years “learning how to live again” in a sober living transition house.
“That first year was a bit like being in ICU,” she said.
She then met construction manager Shannon and the pair have since welcomed two sons – 10-month-old Noah and three-year-old Hudson.
She’s even returned to making music and performing.
“I’m a very lucky girl,” she told Woman’s Day.
“I really thought music was done for me. Then I started to do bits and pieces just for fun and realised it brings me a lot of joy. I’m not chasing unicorns anymore. I just do things that bring me joy and make me feel good. I look at it very differently these days.”
Now, Kate hopes her story can inspire others who are struggling with addiction.
“If you’re out there feeling lost in addiction, thinking there’s no way out, I’m here to tell you that’s not true. I was there. I had lost everything… everyone,” she wrote on Instagram last year when she celebrated seven years of getting clean.
“I thought I couldn’t survive without drugs and alcohol. But I finally got out of my own way, listened to the people who wanted to help, and took it one day at a time.”
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