It is surely one of the strangest celebrity scandals in recent memory. Earlier this year, the former glamour model Katie Price announced that she had married for the fourth time, mere days after meeting new husband Lee Andrews in Dubai. Now, just a few months after their surprise nuptials, Andrews appears to have completely disappeared, according to his wife.
This vanishing act comes as speculation about Andrews reached head-spinning new levels. Ex-girlfriends have emerged to brand him “toxic” and a “narcissist”; one of them has urged Price to “run for the hills”. There have been claims that he can’t actually leave Dubai and is subject to a travel ban (Andrews has previously denied this).
The Foreign Office has reportedly been informed of his disappearance, too, and there are reports suggesting that Interpol wants to talk to him. Plus, there are ongoing questions about apparently AI-generated photos on his social media accounts. It all adds up to one of the weirdest chapters in 48-year-old Price’s showbiz history, already a rollercoaster ride pre-Andrews.
The saga started last week, when the couple had been due to appear in a joint interview on Good Morning Britain, ostensibly to debunk some of the rumours about Andrews. What transpired only served to fuel more conspiracies. Andrews never made it to the studio; Price said he was stuck at the airport, and GMB said that they had asked the Foreign Office whether he was under a travel ban. “We supported a British man who was detained in the UAE,” the office responded – though Price said that she’d spoken to her husband, who denied this was him.
Presenter Susanna Reid seemed to speak for Price’s fans when she told the model: “What I love about you, Katie, is that you’re very open, but I just wonder if he’s telling you everything.” The next plot twist came last weekend, when Price revealed that she hadn’t heard from her husband in days. “The last time I heard from Lee was Wednesday night at 10pm, he was trying to go through the border in Dubai to get on a flight to me,” she said in a video. “We are wondering if he’s been kidnapped – he’s definitely a missing person now.” During this call, Price added, Andrews “said he had ties around his hands, a hood on his head and he was in a van”.
Since then, Price hasn’t heard from Andrews – though she has shared the last text messages she received, in which he claimed he was being taken to a “black site”, a clandestine detention facility. The Dubai police, Price says, “can’t find any record of him” in any prison or police station, and Andrews’ family are thought to have reported him missing. “We are supporting the family of a British man and are in contact with the local authorities,” a spokesperson for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said.
It’s a story that has inevitably captivated social media. After all, “it’s less like celebrity news and more like a thriller”, as pop culture expert Lucie Cave, former editor of Heat magazine, puts it. TikTok sleuths have been piecing together everything they can dig up about Andrews, analysing his allegedly AI-generated photos and – in some cases – even speculating about Price’s role in it all, claiming that it might be a “publicity stunt” (Price has strongly denied this, describing such theories as “disgusting”).
This is because, Cave reckons, for the past quarter-century that Price has been in the spotlight, “we’ve trained ourselves to think that Katie Price is performing, even when she isn’t”. She has “openly talked about controlling her own narrative and there was a long-running assumption that she was orchestrating publicity around herself”, Cave adds – everything, from the relationships to the dramatic reinventions, was positioned as a strategy. “I worked in magazines during that era and commercially that framing worked for everyone including her at the time.”
And so, Cave says, “the idea that Katie was always ‘in on it’ became part of how Britain understood her”. So when there have been times when she has “said something publicly that sounded too dramatic to be true”, our instinctive response might be to laugh it off – but, she says, sometimes these stories do in fact turn out to be true (like when Price said she’d had a relationship with Pop Idol runner-up Gareth Gates). “Katie Price became so associated with spectacle that people stopped recognising when she might simply be telling the truth,” Cave says. “We built a version of Katie Price – and she did to some extent – and that still follows her around now.”
But what do we actually know about Andrews? He grew up in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, with a coal miner father and a mother who worked as a medium and a psychic, but for the past two decades, he has been based in the UAE. He and Price are thought to have started messaging on social media before they eventually met in Dubai earlier this year. “I’m just so happy with my person that is just as happy as I am,” Price said when she confirmed their marriage. “What we have... they haven’t even invented the words.”
According to Andrews’ LinkedIn page, he is the founder and CEO of Aura Sustainable Vehicles and Energy, an electric car company, but according to a registry in the British Virgin Islands, where Aura was registered, the business was dissolved in 2024. Speaking to The Sun earlier this year, however, Andrews said that Aura is “definitely not dissolved, 100 per cent it’s there”.
On the same profile, Andrews uses the title of “Dr”, and reportedly once claimed to hold a PhD from Cambridge University’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. The university, meanwhile, has said it has no record of Andrews as a student; Price has said that his doctorate is from a university in Spain.
There were other claims, too, including that he served as a “member of the board of advisers” for the Labour Party (Labour does not have a board of advisers) and “director of philanthropy at The King’s Trust” (the charity said it had no record of working with him). Andrews has blamed these CV flights of fancy on the work of a former personal assistant. “I think that’s been hyped up and made to look better than what it is and it needs to come down,” he said. “I can’t take the showmanship of it, but I’ll take the accountability.”
A scroll through his Instagram feels like falling into an uncanny valley. All the signifiers of the classic Dubai wellness bro are present and correct. There’s the topless gym selfies, the big, shiny cars and the motivational slogans: “A man who is addicted to making money, eating clean, chasing his purpose and lifting heavy weights is a man who will never be depressed” is one of the personal maxims that he has shared (food for thought, certainly).
But what is particularly striking is the sheen of unreality that seems to cling to some of his posts, prompting speculation that Andrews has allegedly used AI to fashion images of a jetset lifestyle, like some sort of ChatGPT Tom Ripley. Shortly after marrying Price in January, social media users noticed that he had previously posted a photo of Kim Kardashian, apparently attending one of Aura Group’s events in Dubai and wearing a baseball cap featuring the Aura logo alongside that of her own brand, Skims.
We’ve trained ourselves to think that Katie Price is performing, even when she isn’t
Lucie Cave, former editor of Heat magazine
Kardashian, however, hadn’t visited the UAE since 2017, two years before Skims launched. “Kim doesn’t know him, the photo is faked,” a source close to the reality star told The Sun. “This happens to her all the time – she’s never met or worked with this man.”
Another photo showing Elon Musk standing alongside Andrews at an Aura event came under scrutiny, too, after The Sun used AI detection software in an attempt to determine its veracity. One tool concluded that the picture was 93.1 per cent AI-generated, and the paper’s reverse Google Image search revealed that the original photo did not feature the two men at all.
There are other oddities, less glaring but no less strange, on his profile too, like a black and white photo apparently showing a chiselled Andrews speaking into a microphone, elusively captioned “Pod Cast London” (no podcast has materialised as yet). Or the seemingly innocuous workout picture, which Apprentice star Luisa Zissman – who travelled to Dubai on a “man hunt” for Andrews this week – has since suggested is actually a doctored image of the actor Chris Hemsworth, with Andrews’ head superimposed over the Marvel star’s visage. Price, meanwhile, seems unfazed by her husband’s alleged AI habit. “Loads of people can AI stuff,” she told The Sun back in March. “Loads of people airbrush their pictures.”
The star has, however, also reminded her followers that this tale is not just a spectacle. “This isn’t a game – this is real life,” she said on YouTube earlier this week, and in a recent podcast episode, she said that she would be stepping back from sharing updates in order to protect her mental health.
It’s this strange push-pull dynamic, the draw of the larger-than-life story versus our awareness of Price’s vulnerability, that makes it such a confusing episode to unravel. “It makes people feel uncomfortable because it’s like their instinct is to dismiss it as ‘another Katie Price story’, but they’re also not fully convinced they should,” Cave says. And so, she adds, “it’s like people aren’t only sharing the drama – they’re sharing the uncertainty”.
