Kat Von D's radicalisation is complete after her baptism

A look at her Instagram shows she hasn't found God, she's found far right wing hate

Like a lot of you I’m sure, I was a huge Kat Von D fan ever since her first appearance on the TV show Miami Ink.

From the moment she appeared on the ‘00s reality tv show, I thought she was the most nonchalant badass. Everything from the ‘Hollywood’ tattoo etched across her stomach, to the cluster of stars that curved round the corner of her eye, made me want to be her.

Not only was she fearless in her identity, she was talented and when she got her own show - LA Ink - I carried on watching to see not just her, but also her intricate tattoo portraits.

In 2008, she launched her makeup brand with Sephora. I didn’t work in beauty at the time, but I was still obsessed and stocked up on her iconic Tattoo Concealer and Saint and Sinner perfumes whenever I was on holiday in the states.

I wouldn’t say I idolised her, I just deeply respected her style and her talent. She was someone that put her heart and soul into everything. She didn’t just slap her name on a makeup brand, she illustrated and designed every piece of packaging, making it feel like each product was worthy of so much more than just a place in your makeup bag.

I even visited her LA Ink tattoo shop with my friends in LA (we couldn’t get a session) but I did buy a signed copy of her latest book.

Fast forward a few years and I was working my dream job at Cosmopolitan magazine when I found out that Kat would be coming into the office for a Facebook live with the beauty team.

It was the most surreal experience sitting in our Broadwick Street offices next to Kat with my boss Vic on the other side and our friend and colleague Anna, filming the whole thing with an iPhone balanced on a trolley, which was partly obscured by a post it note… which we didn’t notice for a good few minutes (lol).

Kat was as effortlessly cool as I expected. With every ‘dude’ I wanted to be more and more like her and I remember feeling so incredibly jealous when she doodled this beautiful sketch of an eye in Vic’s notebook while we set up our rather shoddy makeshift studio.

Then, in 2017 where I was invited to Dublin by Kat Von D’s team to film some makeup videos for Cosmo digital.

I’ll be honest, it wasn’t the fun laid back experience I’d had before with Kat and was instead a really challenging and futile day.

While Cosmo wanted footage with Kat applying makeup, Kat’s team had other ideas and instead wanted to use their new ‘Beauty Artistry Collective’ to film the videos.

This was a group of 4 artists hand-picked by Kat, who I’m sure were incredibly talented in their own right, but who were also unknown.

Let’s be honest, if it’s your name on the makeup brand, they want you, not your team.

I was on this trip alone and to be honest, in way over my head. Kat’s American team didn’t listen to me at all and one woman in particular on the KVD Beauty team was just so rude.

Fun fact - it was at a recent dinner for a newly launched celebrity makeup brand that I realised the woman I was sat opposite from, was in fact the very same woman that had made my day in Dublin such a nightmare.

I got zero time with Kat and no acknowledgement or hello when she did walk into the room. It felt like an entirely different brand (and person) to the one I previously knew and I left wracked with worry for the shit footage we got, which never did see the light of day.

After that, I lost interest with the brand. That’s the thing with this industry, the proximity to the brands you love is great on one hand but eye opening on the other.

I fell out of love with her products before her, but it was during covid when I finally decided to unfollow her after she kept referring to face masks as “nappies” and mocking people who wore them.

I don’t want to make the time to list all of Kat’s controversies here, but the ones I had chosen to ignore before, were replaced with new ones after she stepped down from her makeup brand.

First there was the move from Los Angeles to Indiana after citing liberal LA’s, “Terrible policies, tyrannical government overreach, ridiculous taxing, amongst so much more corruption".

Then there was the hanging out with and publicly defending Marilyn Manson, despite his sexual assault allegations. Attending Jordan Peterson conferences and proclaiming him as one of her “favourite modern day philosophers”. Oh, and also adding how great it was to be surrounded by, “thousands of people who are all wanting to learn and explore free thinking”.

Jordan Peterson, deserves his own Substack post but he is the self-help guru who regularly posts transphobic abuse aimed at actor Elliot Page and just general cesspool shit like this…

When Kat started blacking out her own vast tattoo collection and throwing out her books on witchcraft, I knew her transformation to radicalised right wing conspiracy theorist was almost complete.

But, then, last week, she completed it. In a romanticised video on her Instagram post, Kat revealed she has now been baptised and it’s so lovely to see that she’s already using religion as a way to justify her hatred.

Just a side note to say, I have no problem with anyone who believes in a god or who gets baptised in later life. What I do have a problem with, is people twisting religion to spew hate towards minority groups and spread misinformation, which is exactly what Kat is doing.

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After finding nothing but TikTok videos praising Kat for “renouncing satan” - by the way, do people really believe she was satanic, because in my opinion she just liked the artistry and the goth aesthetic of it all - I did a bit of my own research.

Kat currently follows 201 people. For someone with 9.5million followers, that is a very edited number.

Scrolling through who she follows you will find a lot of “Christian” accounts - which she has engaged with - who make posts like “The only couples who are sexually incompatible are gay and lesbian couples”.

The homophobia in her following list doesn’t stop there. One preacher she follows made a post for every day of Pride month, twisting bible quotes to suit his own hateful agenda - “I will break the pride of your power," reads one.

Then there’s the transphobia with Christian women jumping on their stories to say they “Hate Pride month” and that they’re “Sick of society pushing children to transition”.

It’s not just the LGTBQ+ community that are targeted either by these accounts. “Everytime I see a grown ass man shopping with a mask on,” was a post from one user whose Insta bio reads “Make common sense great again”.

Then there’s the ‘Patriot Mom’ who moans about the country being “Invaded”, along with accounts that make unintentionally ironic posts like, “The founders called, they want their country back”.

Particularly sad when Kat used to proudly discuss her parents immigrating to America from Mexico.

Oh, and finally, all the toxic male masculinity she surrounds herself with is telling when her feed has posts like, “Our boys need to be built up in our homes, so they can stand firm in a culture that hates them”.

I know this is draining and I really sympathise with anyone who is directly impacted by her bigotry, but, I really just want to make people aware of who Kat is now. Especially, as her fierce gothic independence gained her a following of people who often feel they are on the outskirts of society as it is.

Safe to say any respect I had for her has now been erased, just like her tattoos.