Kelly Osbourne is opening up about her battles with drug and alcohol addiction, joining the online talk show Red Table Talk to discuss getting hooked as a teenager and relapsing after the pandemic.
The TV personality said she ended almost four years of sobriety in April 2021 as the Covid-19 pandemic was waning, triggered into drinking alcohol again after seeing a couple sipping champagne.
“I was alone, sitting by a pool and waiting for somebody to come have a meeting with me. And I saw this woman and her husband had a glass of champagne. It looked really nice and I was like, ‘I can do that, too’,” she said on the Facebook Watch show. “And the next day, I had two glasses. And the day after that, it was bottles.”
Osbourne’s episode of Red Table Talk airs on Facebook Watch on Wednesday at 9am PDT (4pm GMT).
Osbourne also told the hosts — Jada Pinkett Smith, her daughter Willow Smith, and her mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris — about the origins of her addictions.
Her first opiate-based drug addiction was with the painkiller Vicodin, which was prescribed to her after an operation to remove her tonsils when she was 13, sending her on a lifelong battle. “That was all I needed,” she said sadly.
Osbourne said the drug silenced her insecurities. “It felt like life gave me a hug.”
Pinkett Smith responded wryly: “Vicodin will do that.” Osbourne added that Vicodin led to her misusing the painkiller Percocet and then eventually heroin “because it was cheaper”.
Osbourne has discussed her drug and alcohol battles before in several interviews, her 2017 memoir and on podcasts such as Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert.
She has said her drug use became the heaviest during her mother’s cancer battle and after her father, Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne, almost died after an ATV accident in 2003.
Red Table Talk has made headlines with its interview with Olivia Jade Gianulli and when Pinkett Smith and her husband, Will Smith, discussed their marriage.
