By any measure it was a pretty rough week for the Sydney socialite formerly known as Kate Fischer.
Remember her?
Well Tziporah Malkah wishes the media would forget Kate Fischer and leave Tziporah Malkah well and truly alone and, quite frankly, she has a point.
It's been nearly 20 years since the engagement between Kate Fischer and James Packer came to a spectacular end and we all watched – glued to the 6pm news – as reporters interviewed the pretty model and aspiring actor via her Bondi Beach intercom.
Admittedly Fischer had pursued a life in the spotlight, regularly posing in the social pages, modelling for big-name designers such as Alex Perry and carving out a career as an actor by starring in Sirens opposite Hugh Grant and Elle Macpherson.
But the end of her engagement in 1998 to Packer would inevitably sound the death knell of her life in the public gaze. Eventually she left Sydney and moved to Los Angeles while the cameras followed James, who tied the knot with his first wife, Jodhi Meares, in a star-studded extravaganza.
Apart from a couple of mentions in columns such as PS, which revealed years ago that she had changed her name to Tziporah Malkah and embraced the Jewish faith of her ancestors, Malkah has not been a name on the local media radar for many years.
Well, that was until last Monday, when Woman's Day paid an undisclosed sum (understood to be about $10,000) to a paparazzo for a set of unflattering photos of Malkah, wearing a bed sheet, collecting her mail outside her Toorak apartment building. These days she is a carer for the elderly and just another woman in her 40s getting on with life.
It was an image far removed from the glossy, runway-svelte, perfectly coiffed Fischer we remembered, with Malkah looking dishevelled and far curvier than many of us could recall. Following the two-page spread in Woman's Day the story was immediately regurgitated across the internet, with headlines screaming: "Kate Fischer barely recognisable!".
Malkah angrily wrote on social media the day Woman's Day published the images: " 'Kate got fat! Kate got fat! Kate got fat!' is older news than Moses."
But her retort only set the story off again, generating yet more clicks as "news" websites fed readers' perverse desire – mine included – to see the images causing all the fuss.
Behind it all was a real-life woman who, no matter how tough she says she is, was clearly feeling the strain of this unwanted attention. A woman who is no longer a celebrity nor courts public attention. A woman who had no idea she was being photographed.
And it wasn't just the pesky paparazzo, who later claimed to PS he had "stumbled" across Malkah outside her home.
More disturbingly for Malkah, people she considered friends had leaked details of her address and family photos to the media, for what she suspected was "fiscal gain".
Malkah wrote on Facebook: "I am extremely disappointed that there is a rat in my nest of friends. But you have been warned: and next time I post private photos of family members on Facebook I will be very explicit that these are private photos and there will be ramifications if they are put in print elsewhere."
So yes, it was a week Malkah would want to forget, but probably not as much as she wants the world to forget who Kate Fischer was.