Kat Slater (also Moon) is a fictional character from the BBC soap opera EastEnders, played by Jessie Wallace. She is also played by Kate Peck in a flashback in 2001 and Sumar-Elise Sandford in a flashback in 2018. Kat is the second eldest Slater family sister and first appeared on 18 September 2000. Kat's usual dress is very short skirts and leopard-print tops, with much make-up and heavy fake tan. She would often go on all-night binges and has slept with many men, but calmed down in more recent years. As such, she can be described as a "tart with a heart" character. Her initial stint saw her involved in many storylines, most significantly in a plot twist which sees her sister Zoe (Michelle Ryan), revealed to be her daughter after she was raped by her uncle Harry (Michael Elphick) as a child. Another key aspect to the character's storylines is her marriage to Alfie Moon (Shane Richie), prior to which she became briefly engaged to Alfie's love rival Andy Hunter (Michael Higgs); after Kat jilted Andy on their wedding day, he blackmailed her into sleeping with him in his revenge bid against Alfie and Kat. Wallace has won multiple awards for her portrayal as Kat, who has become one of the show's best loved characters. Wallace did not appear in the show between November 2004 and May 2005 following a period of maternity leave, and Kat later left the soap on 25 December 2005. Wallace reprised the role in 2010 and Kat returned on 17 September, before taking leave from the soap again between January and June 2012. The character departed the soap again in May 2015, returning briefly between December 2015 and January 2016. Wallace reprised her role as Kat in the six-part spin-off series Kat & Alfie: Redwater in 2017. Following the confirmation that Redwater would not return for a second series, it was announced that Kat would return to EastEnders; she returned on 22 March 2018. On 26 January 2020, Wallace was suspended from the soap for two months due to her off-screen behaviour; she ultimately returned to work when production of the series resumed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kat departed on 23 March 2020 and returned on 7 September 2020. In the events of Kat's second stint on the soap, in what was called "the biggest soap story in probably the history of soaps", Kat and Ronnie Branning (Samantha Womack) both give birth on the same day, but Ronnie's baby, James Branning, dies and while Kat is in hospital and her baby, Tommy Moon, is unattended, Ronnie swaps the infants. The storyline received over 6,000 complaints, making it the second most complained about EastEnders storyline. Kat's storylines also include suffering a miscarriage, an affair with Derek Branning (Jamie Foreman) which briefly ends her marriage with Alfie, becoming penniless and permanently scarred in a fire and becoming a millionaire. In 2015 Kat's most prominent storyline – the character's rape, is revisited when it is revealed that Kat had given birth to twins and she has a secret son, Zoe's twin brother and this facilitates the characters second exit from the soap. In Kat & Alfie: Redwater, Kat discovers her son is a murderous Catholic priest, Dermott Dolan (Oisín Stack). Since her reintroduction in 2018, Kat's storylines have focused on the breakdown of her and Alfie's marriage and her separation from her children, a relationship with Kush Kazemi (Davood Ghadami), feuds with both her cousin Stacey Slater (Lacey Turner) and Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden), which leads to the latter suffering from an injury caused by Stacey, supporting her friend Whitney Dean (Shona McGarty) with her stalker Leo King (Tom Wells) and developing feelings for Phil after sleeping with him, surviving a hit-and-run perpetrated by Whitney and taking custody of her son's half sister Scarlett Butcher (Tabitha Byron).