Even by showbiz standards, the revelations in Spice Girl Mel B’s forthcoming memoir are jaw-dropping.
In the book, Brutally Honest, she tells in painful detail of lurid sex parties, binge-drinking, drug-taking, emotional abuse at the hands of her ex-husband Stephen Belafonte and a suicide attempt in which she describes taking 200 aspirin pills.
Telling the story of her car-crash life over the past 11 years, Mel — aka, Scary Spice — claims ‘monster’ Stephen, also her manager, was to blame; and that she was drained of her £80 million fortune and left with just £800 when, she says, she finally found the courage to leave him last year.
She says in the book: ‘I felt helpless because I’d allowed this man into my life, and, little by little, insult by insult, indignity by indignity, deal by deal, sex tape by sex tape, I had allowed him to completely take over.’
Mel told how he took control of her emails, phone messages and social media, as well as her bank accounts and work commitments.
Mel B said in her book that Stephen Belafonte (both pictured) took control of her emails, phone messages and social media, as well as her bank accounts and work commitments
Mel B with her father Michael Brown who died last year aged 63 after five year battle with cancer
Perhaps extraordinarily, the 43-year-old claims she spilled out the torrid minutiae of events for the sake of her three daughters. She told an interviewer: ‘It is important that my three girls, who I raise as a single mother, know how to break the chain of abuse, along with any other woman who reads this book.’
Cynics may wonder if Mel’s decision to write the book — which is being serialised in the Sun and the Sun on Sunday — may be financially motivated.
In an interview she gave this weekend, she told how extricating herself from her ten-year marriage to Belafonte, a sometime film producer with champagne tastes and a declared income of zero, has cost her dear.
A settlement reached last month will see her pay American Belafonte £3,800 a month in child support for their daughter Madison, who is seven. She was also ordered to pay his £270,000 legal fees.
When their house in Los Angeles sells, he will get half of the proceeds — £3 million. She also has to pay her own legal bills, said to stand at nearly £1 million.
In the book, Brutally Honest, she tells in painful detail of lurid sex parties, binge-drinking, drug-taking, and emotional abuse
And Mel still faces a legal battle against their former nanny, and against her own lawyers, so the costs continue to build up at a rate which even her £2.1 million a year salary from America’s Got Talent won’t cover.
As she said during their lengthy court battles, she is essentially broke: hence the book, which she hopes will be a hit, and hence her desperation to put together the money-spinning Spice Girls reunion tour next year. The fortune of £20 million to £30 million that all the Spice Girls have accrued from the band has been squandered by Mel on items which no one in their right mind could begin to consider necessary, such as a £200,000 armoured car.
Or how about the £25,000 birthday party for Belafonte, which came complete with fire breathers and elephants?
She blames her former husband for the spending rather than shouldering any blame herself.
That’s not to say, of course, that she hasn’t been to hell and back with Belafonte, who, as we shall see, is an unsavoury character who is blamed by Mel and her family for creating a painful ten-year rift. So how did this personal nightmare unfold?
THE TAINTED LOVE STORY
The story starts when she and Belafonte were married in June 2007 in a £29 drive-through ceremony at the Special Memory chapel in Las Vegas, just a matter of months after their first meeting.
They had met in February and at the time she was seven months pregnant with the child of film star Eddie Murphy — a man whom she’s described as the love of her life, but they split after a year-long affair.
She says in the book: ‘I felt helpless because I’d allowed this man into my life, and, little by little, insult by insult, indignity by indignity, deal by deal, sex tape by sex tape, I had allowed him to completely take over’
Mel, whose daughter Angel with Eddie is now 11, said in an interview this weekend that Eddie dumped her after mistakenly thinking that she’d left him.
She already had a daughter, Phoenix, now 19, from her first marriage to dancer Jimmy Gulzar. That marriage lasted for only 15 months.
In court papers she said: ‘At the time I was vulnerable. I was giving birth as a single mother, my self-esteem was very low and my hormones were way out of balance due to the pregnancy.’
It soon came to light that Belafonte hadn’t declared his previous marriage, said to have been annulled after less than 12 weeks amid claims that he had been ’emotionally abusive’.
Proud mum: Mel B with her three daughters (from left) Angel, Phoenix and Madison
A criminal conviction also emerged. In 2003, Belafonte had been convicted of battering his former partner, actress Nicole Contreras, mother of his young daughter. He was spared jail after taking part in a programme for domestic violence batterers.
Belafonte was also fined for bludgeoning a duck to death with a brick outside his then home in New Jersey.
Mel said she had no idea that he had been married before, or had a conviction, or that Belafonte was not his real name.
In public, all seemed well with the couple. A vow renewal ceremony was arranged in Egypt in 2008, sponsored by OK! magazine.
It was at this point that he fell out with her family. Mel was estranged from them until her father died last year, when there was a reconciliation and she finally found the strength to leave the marriage.
She says in the book that she turned from being an ‘independent single mum’ to a woman who didn’t make any decisions — small or large — and whose relationships with old friends and family dwindled. She says that Belafonte bought expensive clothes, cars and watches for himself.
SEX PARTIES & THE NANNY QUESTION
So what went on in the marriage? Mel B gave numerous interviews talking about her high sex drive and their red-hot sex life, and Belafonte’s brother said he believed that they had an open arrangement and an obsession with pornography.
Behind closed doors it seems the couple were utterly debauched.
She says that she initiated the first threesome with a female friend and continued to enjoy them for years, going out to nightclubs with her husband to pick up women.
She writes: ‘I don’t think it’s shameful to experiment, as long as it is all consensual, and I believe women can enjoy and initiate sex just as much (if not a whole lot more) than men.’
She says she called a friend who came over and they had ‘a lot of champagne and a lot of fun’. After that, she says, she often initiated threesomes herself, targeting LA party girls or lap-dancers, trawling nightclubs to pick out girls they found attractive.
Mel B gave numerous interviews talking about her high sex drive and their red-hot sex life, and Belafonte’s brother said he believed that they had an open arrangement and an obsession with pornography
She does say, though, that by the latter stages of the marriage it was a game she’d grown tired of. In legal papers during their divorce, Mel said that Belafonte forced her into it all.
Belafonte denied this and said in court documents that he has videos which she made where she turns the camera on herself and says ‘I like it’ and ‘that’s hot’.
One shared lover was nanny Lorraine Gilles, 27, who worked for Mel for seven years.
In court papers, Mel claimed that Gilles and Belafonte had plotted to make sex tapes featuring her, and said that Belafonte denigrated her by comparison to the younger woman, and made excessive payments to her. This is denied by Gilles, who said that the sex was consensual, and that the main partner was actually Mel.
Rather extraordinarily, Gilles is not mentioned in the book at all.
Mel is now suing the lawyers who advised her to make the initial, sensational allegations against her and Belafonte, which have formed the basis for the nanny’s still current defamation suit against the former Spice Girl.
VIOLENCE BEHIND CLOSED DOORS?
One friend of Mel’s described Belafonte to me this week as ‘as sinister a character as you would ever hope to meet’.
He said that during the marriage Mel was almost visibly diminished. ‘It was wrong from the beginning,’ he added. ‘We all had our suspicions that something very ugly was playing out behind closed doors.’
Intriguingly, Mel’s Instagram account repeats hashtags such as ‘#stopdomesticviolence’ and ‘#freeatlast’. She tags the charity Women’s Aid in posts, and I understand that some money from the book will go to it.
Unexpectedly, though, any direct accusations of domestic violence against Belafonte are absent.
She says in the memoir that as part of the mediation settlement, she agreed to drop domestic violence charges so that the 64 sex tapes that were made during their marriage would not to be shown in open court.
She writes in the book: ‘Such are the deals we make. Looking back now, that was a deal I regret.’
However, in court papers filed in March 2017, when seeking a temporary restraining order against Belafonte, she branded him a ‘monster’ who had physically abused her.
She claimed that during one rage in November 2007, he tried to choke her and threw her to the ground. She also alleged that Belafonte punched her and split her lip while she filmed a segment with pop star Usher for The X Factor in 2012.
She claimed that in August of the same year, the day after performing at the closing ceremonies for the London Olympics, Belafonte punched her with a closed fist and pushed her down on the carpet.
Belafonte, 43, has continued to deny it all.
Even so, Mel paints a picture of horrifying emotional abuse in the book which, she says, was so bad that she tried to escape the marriage in its first year — and every year afterwards.
Mel says Belafonte would regularly call her a ‘monkey’, ‘stupid’, ‘fat, ugly and old’, ‘dumb’ and ‘a derelict’.
For this there is some corroborating evidence: one former colleague recalls Belafonte ‘screaming’ at her during a photoshoot because he didn’t like the clothes which she had brought.
SNORTING LINES OF COCAINE TO GET BY
What is admitted is the taking of cocaine, up to six lines a day, which she says started a few weeks into filming The X Factor in 2014.
Her routine involved snorting two lines of the drug in the morning, and then taking more after filming. Mel insisted she never took the drug while shooting the show.
‘I can’t say it didn’t help me to have a line of that white powder.’
Why? She says the source of her stress was Belafonte, and that she prayed to God to help her get through the day.
‘It numbed my pain. It lifted me up enough to be ready to fire on all cylinders and forget about everything but the show.’
She described how she started using cocaine a fortnight into filming just to get her through the series and her terrible marriage.
In an interview she gave this weekend, she told how extricating herself from her ten-year marriage to Belafonte, a sometime film producer with champagne tastes and a declared income of zero, has cost her dear
One close pal told me this week: ‘Nothing she did was ever enough for him. She was completely out of her depth with him. Yes, she was wild and into all sorts, but nothing on the scale that he was.’
Another pal tells me that when he would call her at home in LA, Belafonte would listen in. He felt that she was constantly watched.
Her friend adds: ‘She doesn’t understand why she fell for him, or why she stayed. She can see that it’s a part of a pattern: her first boyfriend ended up in jail, Jimmy Gulzar was no good for her, and then came Stephen.
‘She was terrified of him — that was the relationship — and she is grateful to be out the other side.’
Mel says that she is now suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and will have treatment for that.
As she writes: ‘All smiles on the outside, misery and self-loathing on the inside, always telling the world how happy I was, when really all I ever wanted was to scream for help.’
HER DARKEST CHAPTER
In one of her most disturbing confessions, Mel writes that she attempted suicide on December 11, 2014, while she was in London appearing as a judge on The X Factor. ‘As each pill goes into my mouth, I ask myself, ‘Are you sure?’ she wrote in the extract serialised in the Sun on Sunday. ‘And I take another one. Ten, twenty, fifty. One hundred.’
She said that after taking 200 pills, she told Belafonte what she had done.
In court documents, she claimed that he told her ‘Die bitch’ and tried to stop her going to hospital.
In one of her most disturbing confessions, Mel writes that she attempted suicide on December 11, 2014
He countered that this was not true, that she had simply taken a drug overdose, and was addicted to drugs and alcohol.
In the book she says: ‘I felt emotionally battered, estranged from my family. I felt ugly and detested by the very man who once promised to love and protect me, my husband and manager Stephen.’
She wrote that as soon as she’d swallowed that last pill, she knew she didn’t want to die — but she then found she couldn’t get out of the room because the door was ‘jammed’.
She says it was her attempts to escape from the room that caused the bruises seen by everyone on The X Factor final three days later.
She was admitted to Northwick Park hospital in London in a serious condition. Simon Cowell gave her the number of a divorce lawyer, and both Spice Girls Mel C and Emma Bunton invited her to stay with them.
Instead, Mel went back to LA and to Belafonte for another two years of hell — continuing to binge drink, to use cocaine and have threesomes with Stephen.
She wrote: ‘Amazing what you do when you believe . . . that you are a worthless piece of c**p.’
Two months after the incident, she told Hello! magazine: ‘No, my husband didn’t hit me. No, I didn’t get held hostage. Me and my husband are madly in love.’
AND WHAT NOW — A FRESH START?
Post-divorce, the madness apparently continues.
Her former nanny Rusty Updegraff quit his job and called her the the ‘world’s number one bad mother’ in a court filing three months ago.
He said that she drank excessively every day, starting at 10am, and submitted a picture of a tower of tequila boxes stacked floor to ceiling in her kitchen. Ever since then, she’s had to submit to court-ordered sobriety tests — and has passed all three of them so far.
Updegraff also claimed she slept with dozens of men post-split, including her driver, the children’s piano teacher and a guy she picked up at Soho House members’ club.
He claimed she would require sex with three men a day.
Mel admitted to an interviewer: ‘I did have to kind of ease my pain. No, I’m not an alcoholic. No, I’m not a sex addict. Sometimes it is too hard to cope with all the emotions I feel. But the problem has never been about sex or alcohol — it is underneath all that.’
Her ‘trauma’ has also led her to recently having a vaginal ‘rejuvenation’ procedure — against the advice of a doctor who told her it was unnecessary — and also to undertake cosmetic surgery on her face.
As she emerges from her disastrous decade, Mel now has the Spice Girls tour ahead of her. By attempting to recreate the success of her heyday, she would dearly love to claw back her fortune. Only time will tell if she manages to heal the wounds of her turbulent past.