For reality TV star Sam Faiers, it was the trip of her dreams.
A private jet to Los Angeles. An appearance at the lavish Nobu restaurant in Malibu with Kim Kardashian’s hairstylist Chris Appleton. It all felt a long way from her humbler beginnings 5,000 miles away in the Essex town of Brentwood.
Demure and sophisticated in designer clothes, Sam projected a very different image on that LA jaunt last year to that of her younger days back in Britain, where she was an often controversial member of The Only Way is Essex cast.
She joined the ITV show back in 2010 alongside the likes of Mark Wright, Chloe Sims, her ex-fiance Joey Essex and her sister, Billie. Yet today Sam, 34, is keeping rather different company having raked in an extraordinary £8million thanks to her collagen beauty range Revive.
This week she unveils a new partnership with the health charity Vitamin Angels, which provide supplements to vulnerable populations around the world to combat malnutrition. She has also struck up a firm friendship with Britain’s Got Talent’s Amanda Holden, I am told, and is paying the TV star what’s been described to me as a ‘small fortune’ to act as brand ambassador for Revive.
The business has been so successful that it is stocked in US stores and sales have notched up more than £13million in revenue.
But now I hear her success is causing something of a drama back on home turf, for Sam appears to have waved a permanent goodbye to Essex, saying ‘she will never go back’ – a pledge which has left at least some of her friends ‘relieved’.
It’s no surprise that the jet setting life is more appealing to her these days. But she also finds herself at the centre of a number of feuds which have led to her falling out with some of those who were once her closest friends.
Sam projected a very different image on her LA jaunt last year to that of her younger days back in Britain
Sam joined The Only Way is Essex in 2010, but today she has little to do with her home county
‘Sam has turned her back on Essex for good,’ says my source. ‘She has left it all behind for something far more glamorous.
‘Her TOWIE co-stars weren’t always very nice to her. She gave as good as she got, but those feuds she had were hard at the time. Now she just wants to move on.
‘She must look at those people who are still on TOWIE, like Amy Childs, Lauren Goodger, and the others and think, “ha ha, I’m out of here”.
‘But Sam rubbed so many people up the wrong way, she took no prisoners at times, it felt like at one point there were just so many rifts. Who’d want to go back to that?’
At the top of the list of fall outs are her ex-boyfriends, Joey and Mark, neither of whom follow her on social media today.
In fact, the fallout from her romance with Joey – who last year starred on Love Island – also prompted his family to turn on Sam, and nobody more so than his cousin Chloe Sims, who revealed that Sam had pushed him down the stairs back in 2014.
Chloe was furious and Joey had been left in tears after the bust-up that had ended with him tumbling down the stairs at her house. Sam was also said to have slapped him. Joey claimed he had visited her in a bid to rekindle their relationship – but the attempt ended in a blazing argument.
Chloe said: ‘Joey says she slapped him more than once. He would bottle things up then come to me, burst into tears and lay it all out.’
Sam fell out with her sister Billie (left) after Sam moved from Essex to her £2.25million dream home in Surrey in 2020
Sam in LA with Kim Kardashian’s hairstylist Chris Appleton promoting a new campaign for Revive Collagen
‘Chloe absolutely hated Sam,’ says a friend, though – as is the way in these celebrity worlds – they do follow each other on social media today.
Her relationship with Mark Wright, meanwhile, was complicated by claims that he cheated with her while dating former fiancée Lauren Goodger.
Those who know Mark say that he has now ‘cut her out and moved on with his life’.
‘Mark and Sam had a tumultuous relationship,’ says my source. ‘They were feuding for some time but Mark will be happy she is no longer around.’
Sam even fell out with her sister Billie after Sam moved from Essex to her £2.25million dream home in Surrey in 2020 with partner Paul Knightley and their kids Paul, eight, and Rosie, five and two-year-old Edward.
Billie, 35, still lives in Essex with her husband Greg Shephard and their three children.
A year later Sam left their ITVBe reality show The Mummy Diaries, which they’d appeared in together for five years, leaving Billie ‘devastated’. Billie continued to do the show solo for several more series.
‘I was a bit shocked,’ Billie admitted on The Mummy Diaries. ‘I was like, “Why do you want to live in Surrey when all your family live in Essex? Trying to get away from us, are you?” I actually think it’s quite selfish for her to move, because I won’t be able to see [baby] Paul as much.’
Sam’s biggest feud to date was with ex-best pal Ferne McCann, pictured, after audio footage was leaked in which Ferne allegedly branded her pal a ‘fat c***’ back in 2022
One source adds: ‘You wonder if even Billie struggled to deal with Sam’s success at one point.
‘Sam quit the show that had made them, that must have been hard.’
However, it appears the sisters patched up relations sufficiently to return earlier this year in a new ITV2 reality show called Sam and Billie: Sister Act (though they have already been caught up in controversy for comments made on the show, including Sam saying she doesn’t use sunscreen on her children).
The sisters have been through so much together, growing up without their father Lee after their mother Suzie Wells split from him when they were toddlers. In 2012, their stepfather Dave Chatwood was jailed for 12 years over drugs and firearm offences.
They have since spoken openly about his battle with alcoholism and his time in rehab.
But Sam’s biggest feud to date was with ex-best pal Ferne McCann after audio footage was leaked in which Ferne allegedly branded her pal a ‘fat c***’ back in 2022. They were once inseparable, and Sam stood by her best friend from school when her then boyfriend was jailed for a nightclub acid attack in London in 2017.
The clip sent shockwaves through the showbiz industry, while Sam’s mum Suzie was so appalled by the message that she posted it on Instagram to shame her daughter’s former pal. ‘This has come as a complete shock to myself and my family,’ she wrote. ‘Ferne has always been a very close family friend to all of us over the past 20 years.’
But no more. It spelled an end to the women’s two-decade-long friendship – and there is now, I’m told, no way back.
‘Don’t talk to Sam about Ferne,’ warns one TOWIE insider. ‘She hates her and vice versa. That friendship will never be mended.
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about what would happen if they came face to face again.
‘It is very much for the best that Sam and Ferne are no longer in the same county, or even country. It’s best for everyone that Sam has left Essex.’
