Katie Price has halted her complaint against Heat magazine for making fun of her disabled son after it apologised and paid a donation to a children’s charity.
Heat apologised on its website, heatworld.com, and again in the print edition out today [4 December] for last week’s free sticker which featured an image of Katie Price’s son Harvey with the words “Harvey wants to eat me!”.
In this week’s edition of the Emap celebrity magazine [8 – 14 December], Heat said: ‘It was never our intention to cause offence to Harvey’s family and friends nor to you, our readers. In particular, it was never our aim to make fun of Harvey’s disabilities.
‘We now accept that the decision to include this sticker was a mistake and we recognise that it has caused offence, not only to Katie and Peter Andre, but to a number of readers.”
The magazine said it had made a unspecified voluntary donation to the Vision Charity, which Price, better known as Jordan, has worked with. Price’s son was born with a rare disorder, septo-optic dysplasia, which causes blindness and growth hormone deficiency.
Heat apologised to its readers after its forums were flooded with complaints about the title’s sticker, one of 50 given away free last week.
The Press Complaints Commission received over 100 complaints about the sticker, second only to a Tony Parsons column in the Mirror which criticised the role of the Portugese in the Madeleine McCann investigation in October this year.
The PCC initially received over 30 complaints before contacting Price’s representatives last week. The Page 3 model turned TV presenter and author then made a complaint to the PCC.
A spokesman for the PCC said that only two or three cases garnered such a large number of complaints each year.
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