Nearly 17 years after surviving an acid attack that left her partially blind and permanently scarred, British television presenter Katie Piper is now taking the next step in her recovery journey.
“This marks the start of a journey to have an artificial eye, with an incredible medical team behind me.”
Alongside her caption, Piper shared a video that appeared to show her being fitted with the prosthetic eye shell.
“As always I’m incredibly grateful to all those in the NHS and private health care system for their talent and kindness,” she wrote.
“I will share my journey, I’m hopeful and nervous about being able tolerate it and would love to hear from any of you in the comments if you’ve been on this journey or have any advice.”
At the age of 24, Piper was severely burned and lost sight in her left eye after her former boyfriend, Daniel Lynch, arranged for an accomplice, Stefan Sylvestre, to throw sulfuric acid in her face as she walked down a street in North London in March 2008.
Lynch, who was 33 at the time of the attack, was sentenced to a minimum of 16 years behind bars.
Sylvestre, then 19, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole and was later released in 2018. However, in October 2022, he was recalled to prison for breaching the conditions of his parole.
Piper was forced to undergo hundreds of procedures to repair damage to her face since surviving the life-changing attack, including skin grafts and reconstructive surgeries.
Piper, a panelist on the ITV talk show “Loose Women,” has previously discussed the procedures she has had to undergo to reconstruct her injured eye.
She took to Instagram in the fall of 2023 to share that she had undergone a tarsorrhaphy—a surgical procedure that partially or fully joins the upper and lower eyelids together to close the eye.
“I’m ok with looking different to everyone else but operations can sometimes take me back to memories of how this all started and that’s hard mentally,” she wrote.
‘Story of Hope’
Piper’s story was chronicled in the 2009 Channel 4 documentary “Katie Piper: My Beautiful Face.” That same year, she launched the Katie Piper Foundation to assist other survivors of burn injuries.The bestselling author has also touched upon her experiences in more than a dozen books, including “Beautiful” (2011), “Things Get Better” (2012), and “Confidence: The Secret” (2016).
Piper married her husband, Richard Sutton, in 2015. The couple share two daughters: Belle, 10, and Penelope, 7.
After more than a decade of advocacy, the television presenter was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2022 as part of the UK’s New Year Honours List for her charitable work.
Piper spoke with Harper’s Bazaar before receiving the honor, noting that her path to becoming a charity founder was rather unconventional.
“This sounds like a very horrific story, but actually, what this story is is one of hope, not just hope for me, but hope for all of us,” she said after recounting her attack.
“One of the ways I survived this was by relying on the most powerful muscle in the human body, which is the mind.
“The mind can be a desperate, dark prison, but it can also be a tower of strength. And when we tap into and understand our mindset, it can get us through some of our deepest, darkest hours. And hope really is all I held onto for some of the most difficult times of my own life.”
