Essex farm owner Jodie Marsh says she now struggles to pay for her mortgage after once being paid £30k
Jodie Marsh, who owns a small Essex farm that she runs as an animal rescue centre, has revealed how she went from being paid £30,000 on photoshoots to being unable to pay for her mortgage. The former glamour model, 45, was often in the papers after finding fame in the Noughties.
She has now retired from showbiz and completely changed her career, as she began running an animal sanctuary in 2020. But Jodie has admitted that she made some dubious decision when it comes to money after becoming famous thanks to her photoshoots, The Mirror reports.
She said she negotiated a deal with the Daily Star which meant she was being paid £30,000 for a photo - while other girls were receiving £50 a shoot. Later on in her career, she landed a high profile TV gig that she was paid £150,000, but she claimed she "never saw" the money as she told the Daily Mail: "This was before everything was digital. There's probably not even a record of it."
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In an interview with the newspaper, Jodie opened up on the financial struggles she faced when she retired from the spotlight, saying: "I was so fed up, I was getting trolled and people were just being nasty to me all the time, it was just horrible. So I sort of stepped out of the limelight but then it came a point where I couldn't afford to even pay my mortgage."
But now, she faces huge costs with Fripps Farm and needs £24,000 per month to run it. Jodie said her fans have been stepping in to help her pay for the farm - and said that once she spent £20,000 rescuing Maximus, a pony that had been left to die on the side of the road.
She explained: "Our followers were amazing. They really stepped up to help fund that and donate towards his vet bills. We couldn't have done it without them. Maximus would be dead because nobody else was willing to help him."
Jodie added: "We have these days called sound for a pound, most people can afford that no matter how skint they are, they can afford one pound a month. If there's an animal in the hospital and it needs treatment and we need to pay the bill, we go on Instagram, tell them what's happening and they all just give one pound at a time.
"If you've got 20,000 people giving one pound a month, that's £20,000 month, and we actually have got that." She said another way to earn money is OnlyFans, where she shares her photos and earns even though she no longer takes part in photoshoots for newspapers.
She said: "We needed to put perimeter fencing around the whole entire farm, and that cost £65,000. I funded that entire thing from my OnlyFans. For the first year my OnlyFans also paid all my staff. I never took a penny for myself." Jodie said she now earns a couple grand a month on OnlyFans and thinks it will "shoot up again" as she aims to post more often on the site.
In September, Jodie said she feared someone was poisoning her animals as she mourned the death of one of her sheep. Speaking to her fans on social media, Jodie said she was going to end up "hurting people" if she discovered someone was poisoning her animals as she updated her followers on Wilf, one this year's lambs.
"The vet is saying it's not a normal case of bloat and he hasn't got bloat as you have to gorge on something to get bloat and he hasn't," Jodie said as she shared Wilf was refusing to eat and something from diarrhoea. She added how her animals' diets are "carefully managed". She continued: "At this stage, I am not ruling out poisoning and nor is the vet. And I am literally going to start hurting people because the police aren't helping me, the council aren't helping me - nobody's helping me - and now we have a sheep that is dying in our arms and I am going to lose my s**t."
Jodie then returned to her Instagram Stories in tears and broke the sad news that the sheep had died. "We did everything for him," the former glamour model told her followers as she thought back the tears. She then shared her plans to have a full autopsy because "there was nothing wrong with him - he was bouncing around. He was so fine and then all of a sudden went downhill. We are in bits here. There is just no reason for it at all."