Josie Cunningham’s former occupation — that of warfare specialist in the Royal Navy — must be coming in rather handy at the moment. For the 23-year-old would-be glamour model has been busy deflecting the salvos fired at her from some very disgruntled taxpayers.The single mother-of-two recently sparked outrage by boasting that she had her breasts increased from a 32A to 36DD courtesy of the NHS, then made matters worse by announcing casually just five months later that she’d like her £5,000 implants removed — at a further cost of £1,600 — because they are attracting too much negative publicity.
It’s an audacious volte-face from a woman who has been dubbed Katie Cut-Price for her aspirations to emulate the glamour model of the same name. Especially as she is hoping that the NHS will, once again, carry out the procedure.‘I was very deserving of my boob job,’ says Josie, who lives in Leeds. ‘But the problem was, I rushed into the decision to have them taken up to a 36DD, and I don’t feel very confident about them now. ‘Everyone is knocking me, but I want loads more surgery to make me look good. I want people to take me seriously and stop branding me just “the girl with the big NHS boobs”. It’s unfair.’‘Unfair’ is a word that has been used rather frequently where Josie is concerned.
Critics argue that the NHS money used to increase her breast size should have been spent on far more deserving cases. Indeed, it was revealed that just a few miles away from her home in Leeds, two-year-old cerebral palsy sufferer Oliver Dockerty had been turned down for funding for an operation which could allow him to walk.Thankfully, after reading about his plight in the Daily Mail, generous readers helped to raise the £24,000 needed for Oliver to have his operation privately.Angry members of the public have even created an online petition demanding that Josie pay the money that was spent on her surgery back to the state.
Josie, however, remains unrepentant, arguing that the operation was justified due to the ‘emotional distress’ she had suffered as a result of having small breasts. Moreover, she believes she has every right to reverse the boob job — again at the taxpayer’s expense.
‘I agree that it’s disgusting that some people are refused medical treatment, but it’s the NHS’s decision, not mine,’ she says.
‘I’ve paid taxes since I was 15 years old, so have my mum and dad. We’ve paid into the system, and my case was not just about cosmetic changes, it was about my peace of mind.
‘If I was in charge, I’d give everyone the treatment they needed — particularly children and soldiers who have lost limbs. But to those people who say I didn’t need the first operation, I’d say you haven’t been through what I’ve suffered. Just try and go through it yourselves before you comment. It’s horrendous.’
So what exactly is this hell that Josie Cunningham has endured? Brought up in Leeds by her mother Lisa, who works in retail management, and her father, Graham, a heavy machine operator, Josie was a sporty little girl with lots of friends who was often named ‘man of the match’ in football games. Despite her tomboyish tendencies, she dreamed of becoming a model from the tender age of eight or nine. ‘Little girls want to look like princesses, and I was no different,’ she says. ‘Seeing lots of beautiful models on television and in magazines, I wanted to be just like them.‘Mum and Dad have brought me up to believe I can achieve anything, so it was always at the back of my mind that it’s a career I’d like to try.’
But at 13 she began to be taunted by school bullies about her appearance, shattering her confidence. ‘It was constant abuse, with people calling me ugly and telling me I had a big nose,’ she says. ‘But it was the abuse from boys about my flat chest that really got to me. They’d pin me on the ground and write the words “ironing board” on me in felt-tip pen.
‘Once, 15 of them attacked me outside school. The police were called and several of them got cautions. I was terrified. and it really knocked my confidence.‘In the end, I had to take a year-and-a-half out of school because it got so bad. I was privately tutored at home, but it meant that my GCSE coursework suffered.
‘I visited my GP at least twice a year from the age of 15 to ask him why my breasts weren’t starting to grow, and he thought it might be because I’d had such an active, sporty childhood,’ she says.
‘He wouldn’t refer me for surgery or do anything about it until I was 21, when he said I’d stop developing.’
While Josie delighted in parenthood, her pregnancies didn’t boost her bust, and she says that her negative body image took a toll on her relationship.‘Neither of my pregnancies made my boobs bigger and I didn’t breastfeed,’ she says.
‘I was so self-conscious that I’d wear a T-shirt when I was being intimate with my boyfriend. In fact, that was one of the reasons we split up, I didn’t want him to see me naked. It caused a whole lot of problems.’
Her self-esteem was further eroded when, she says, another boyfriend was violent towards her. She shows me a scar on her left arm where she says he stabbed her. ‘He was always critical about my body and particularly my boobs,’ she says. ‘He often said he would cheat on me and that I wasn’t a proper woman. That’s how I felt, too. We split up after he was violent towards me. It got pretty nasty, and my confidence was at an all-time low.’
Listening to Josie, there can be little doubt that her personal life has been dysfunctional and often unhappy — but most people would surely question whether she is right to fixate on her breast size as the explanation for everything that has gone wrong. She, however, is adamant this is the root of all her woes.
‘I was in need of bigger boobs for more than just cosmetic reasons,’ she argues. ‘It had affected so much of my life and had started to affect my children’s lives, too. From the moment I woke up, all I would think about is how I could get breast surgery. I couldn’t focus on anything else.I’d tried counselling to feel better about myself, but it didn’t work. They found that I was psychologically stable, but on the edge of depression. ‘I felt I couldn’t be a proper mother. I couldn’t take the children swimming and I tended not to go out much with them case I had a panic attack.’
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