The Sunday Times Magazine • 27Osbourne says she can empathise with
people who are unhappy in their bodies —
although in her case it has been to do with
bulimia rather than gender dysphoria. “It’s
horrific. I used to eat and eat and eat. It was
part of my shield,” she says. “I felt that the
less attractive and the bigger I was gave me
strength. It’s weird but that’s how I felt.”
Osbourne confesses that she still throws up
after eating. “I’m, like, I just f***ing ate that,
I’m going to get rid of it. I’ve done it for
years and years. It’s become part of me,” she
says. “Do I accept it? Do I like it? No, I have
the worst acid reflux in the entire world.”
She also confesses to an addiction to
shopping. What does she buy? “Too many
clothes, too many shoes, too many bags, too
many candles. I don’t like a sofa — let’s
change it again. I don’t like the colour of this
room. Let’s change it again.” There’s no
looking at the price tags before purchasing:
“It’s terrible. It’s a new-money way to live
your life. It’s a way of showing off.” Today
she is wearing a blue Zara suit ($150, about
£115), new Chanel shoes ($1,350) and a plain
white T-shirt, “which cost about $600”.T
alk turns to Britain. She is
furious about the red tape
bogging down the process for
rehoming Ukrainian refugees
— “I think it’s heinous what
[Boris Johnson] is doing” —
and vows she’ll look into moving two
Ukrainian families into the unused
properties on her Buckinghamshire estate.
Imagine fleeing war and ending up living
chez Osbourne, I say. “Ozzy’s very well
known in Ukraine,” she says, a smidge
sharply. “I think they’d be happy.”
She likes Johnson’s “eccentricity”, but
thinks he should have fessed up immediately
over partygate. “Don’t underestimate people
who voted for you, and tell the truth.”On her no-BS theme, the Duke of York
could have saved his skin if he’d only told
the truth (as Osbourne sees it) about
Virginia Giuffre, who alleges that he had
sex with her when she was a teenage
trafficking victim of Jeffrey Epstein.
“He should have said, ‘I wasn’t married.
Everybody knew me as Randy Andy. My
friend at the time [Epstein] was surrounded
by young women, and [Giuffre] was up for
it, I was up for it, and it’s not illegal in
England to have sex with somebody her age.
Don’t come up with bullshit about a pizza
place [his alibi was a children’s party at
Woking’s Pizza Express] that closes at 11.”
(Prince Andrew has always denied the
allegations and settled with Giuffre out of
court last month.)
An ardent royalist, Osbourne “absolutely
adores” the Duchess of Cornwall, because
“she’s real, she’s down to earth and she’s a
laugh”. Clearly Team Kate and Wills, she
doesn’t like what she calls “the victim
thing” with Meghan and Harry, and
believes their lives would have improved in
the UK had they stuck it out. “The situation
is you either love them or you don’t. There’s
no in between with those two.”
Tentatively I bring up Ozzy’s cheating.
In 2016 Osbourne slipped her husband
extra sleeping pills to extract a confession
about an affair he had with his hairdresser.
The truth spilled out and she promptly cut
the sleeves off all his coats.
“Back in the touring early days it was
ten people a night, all dirty old groupies.
It was nothing to me,” she says. “As he got
older he knew their names, where they
lived, all that.” She is puzzled that the otherwomen — there was a “Russian whore”
as well — were not especially attractive.
“At one point I thought, ‘Is he doing it to
make them feel good?’ The Salvation Army
of old groupies.”
She can joke about it now, but the
betrayal led to Osbourne, who has been on
antidepressants for years, trying to take her
own life. “I was tired. I couldn’t take the
drama of everything in my life. Everything
was too much,” she recalls. So she checked
into a mental health facility, or, as she called
it, the “semi nut house”. “I stayed there
and got myself together, and you start off
again, don’t you?”
Some friends judged her as weak for
taking Ozzy back. “No, I’m not. I love him.
I can leave if I want, take half of everything
and go. I don’t want to.” He still begs her
forgiveness and is “very romantic”. “Before
his accident he used to bring me breakfast
on a tray in bed. And he’d go into the garden
and get a flower and write little notes for
me. I’ve got them all framed.”
Over icy G&Ts on a face-meltingly hot
day, I ask about the physical side of their
relationship. “Oh, Ozzy was like a rabbit,”
she says, delightedly. “He was the only
guy that I ever really enjoyed sex with
because he’d laugh and be silly.” Do they
still have sex? “No, no, not now. But I just
adore him. I just couldn’t think of my life
without him. We kiss each other all the
time and cuddle.”
Osbourne is a fast talker and we cover
all sorts. How she’s renting a private jet
to fly back to the UK with her eight dogs,
who have a dog walker and a full-time
dog-sitter (“I’d never put them
underneath”); the demise of TV talent
shows (“You can only fish for so long, and
all the fish are gone”); Simon Cowell
(“He’s like me, he likes a good bit of
cosmetic surgery”); and the Russians in
Beverly Hills (“Most of the hookers are
Russians here. An unbelievable amount”).
During a recent dinner at this restaurant
she and a girlfriend whispered all evening
out of fear someone would overhear their
conversation. “Everybody’s scared of saying
something wrong that somebody would
take and sell,” she says. “It’s no way to bloody
live. I don’t want it. I don’t need it.” That’s
why she wants to leave eggshells Hollywood
with Ozzy and the eight dogs and be her
best, straight-shooting self back in Britain.
“It’s just our time to go home,” Osbourne
says. “I don’t want to be judged” nEROTEME
“Ozzy was like a rabbit. He was the only guy I ever
really enjoyed sex with because he’d laugh and be silly”
Sharon and Ozzy
with their son,
Jack, his fiancée,
Aree Gearhart,
and Jack’s
daughters during
summer 2020The Talk starts tomorrow at 9pm on TalkTV, Monday to Friday, and is available on
Sky, Virgin Media, Freeview and Freesat, other streaming services and at talk.tv