Eddie Murphy asked Mel B’s father for her hand in marriage, moved her and her daughter into his Hollywood Hills mega-mansion and got matching tattoos before their relationship fell apart, the former Spice Girl is to reveal in her new memoir.
The America’s Got Talent judge is to use Brutally Honest, published next month, to say that the she and the Hollywood superstar’s relationship was far longer and more meaningful than had previously been suggested.
She will also claim that it was she who forced him to take a DNA test to prove the paternity of their daughter Angel in the aftermath of their split, to force him to acknowledge the child.
In an early draft of the explosive memoir – obtained exclusively by DailyMailTV – Mel B says that the Beverly Hills Cop star had a ‘momentous’ effect on her life and that their bond was so close they even had each other’s autographs tattooed on the top of their thighs at a Hollywood tattoo parlor.
Bad romance: Mel B has finally revealed details of her nine-month relationship with Eddie Murphy which ended in bitter paternity battle in 2007
Mom and daughters: Mel has an 11-year-old daughter by Murphy, Angel Iris Murphy Brown (far right) who the comedian repeatedly denied was his biological child. DailyMailTV has learned Murphy pays $25,000 a month in child support
But the star also admits that being with the world renowned comedian felt like living in a ‘gilded cage’ and that she had never met a man who wanted to ‘possess’ her so completely.
The claims are one of the first proper insights into the relationship, which happened in 2006, and has been surrounded by silence from Murphy and Brown.
DailyMailTV can also reveal Murphy pays $25,000 a month in child support for Angel – $300,000 a year – in a deal struck following the paternity battle in 2007.
But Brown uses the book to put her side of a relationship whose end, she says, saw her wrongly portrayed as a ‘tramp’ and a ‘gold-digger’.
Crucially, she maps out a timeline which puts the pair together for nine months, far longer than the three months which had been widely believed to be the case.
And Brown, who was 32 when they met, says that it was love at first sight for both her and Murphy, then 45.
‘The moment I laid eyes on him it was as if a 2,000-volt electric current had passed between us,’ Mel writes in her memoir.
‘I felt a hundred different emotions at once, from confused to elated, to happy, to scared, to relaxed to incredulous… and everything in between.
‘I felt I had known this man all my life and that I was staring my destiny in his face.’
She said Murphy, now 57, turned her life upside down and she fell instantly in love with him.
Mel, now 43, met the actor through a mutual friend who had been pestered by the actor to introduce her.
Mel, who was single after coming out of a long-term relationship with a woman, was eventually invited to a dinner party at the actor’s home.
The pair began dating shortly after Murphy’s divorce from his first wife, Nicole Mitchell Brown (left) in 2006. Murphy has been in a relationship with Paige Butcher (pictured right) since 2012
She turned up at Murphy’s gated mega-mansion in the Hollywood Hills and was ushered into a huge kitchen filled with people.
As she looked around she locked eyes with Murphy, she writes in her book, and it felt like ‘fireworks’ had started going off inside her.
‘It was as if there was no one else in the whole world,’ she said.
‘Had I honestly experienced some cosmic love struck moment with Eddie Murphy in his kitchen?’
Mel rushed to the nearest bathroom to compose herself but decided she had to leave because she couldn’t handle the situation, describing herself as ‘freaked out’.
But as she left the bathroom she walked straight into Murphy and blurted out an excuse as to why she had to leave.
Mel told Murphy she had arranged to meet friends at the Mondrian hotel, but drove home, took her make-up off and got into bed.
Within ten minutes her friend called and said Murphy had moved the party to the Mondrian.
‘I couldn’t believe it. Clearly someone was making sure I had to deal with it,’ she writes.
Mel got dressed, put her make-up back on and went to the Mondrian.
She says Murphy was the perfect gentleman over dinner and the next day he rang Mel and said: ‘Melanie, do you mind if I see you every day for a few days? But I don’t like going out, so will you come to my house?’
She agreed and claims she and Murphy were like ‘two little excitable kids’ instantly hitting it off.
Mel described the star’s home as a ‘beautiful, pristine mansion’ that was ‘gobsmackingly incredible’.
In the foyer, she wrote, there was a glass roof which opened at the push of a button. He had a giant Jacuzzi which Murphy had never used – until Mel made him get in it naked.
Mel became pregnant while on vacation with Murphy in Mexico in July, 2006. She says Murphy was initially delighted to learn she was expecting and even asked her and her daughter to move in. Above she is pictured announcing the paternity case with lawyer Gloria Allred in 2007
Single mom: Mel (pictured with baby Angel in 2008) says that to this day she has no clue why Murphy denied paternity and admits his ‘hideous’ words have ‘haunted’ her ever since
There was a gym that Mel said was fit for an Olympic athlete, a bowling alley and a huge swimming pool.
In their time together, Murphy would play old Elvis movies and films like Blazing Saddles, which stars his hero Richard Pryor, and also speak about his childhood in projects in New York, where he and his older brother Charlie were partly brought up in foster care at a time when their mother was ill.
‘He was fascinating to me. He’d had a life I couldn’t imagine,’ writes Mel.
She described a ‘magical’ kingdom Murphy had created around him in which Stevie Wonder would come and play the piano and Hollywood actor Denzel Washington was a regular guest.
Murphy – famous for hit movies like Trading Places and The Nutty Professor as well as his voiceover work on Shrek – is worth an estimated $85million.
Every night at 6pm his personal chef would prepare a lavish buffet for family and friends.
That was not the end of his generosity: he had Brown chauffeured in his Rolls Royce and gave her a credit card, saying ‘it will make me happy’ if she uses it. But, she claims, she gave it him back after a couple of weeks.
The former Spice Girl – who recently claimed she was entering rehab for alcohol and sex addiction – said their relationship was ‘incredibly special’ but says they didn’t have sex until six weeks after meeting.
She recalls going out to buy some green see-through underwear embroidered with cherries and cracking jokes about ‘popping my cherry’.
‘When it happened it wasn’t sex. It was like poetry, every touch, every kiss every sense out of this world. We were both completely besotted with each other,’ she writes.
Mel says her family approved of Murphy because they’d never seen her so ‘blissed out’.
‘Every day I would wake up and he’d tell me I was the most beautiful, incredible woman. I never felt so loved,’ she wrote.
She claims it was Murphy, not her, who pushed for their relationship to go to the next level. He told Mel he wanted to get married and have a baby with her after just a few weeks, she writes, but that he insisted on asking her dad Martin, a welder from Leeds, in the north of England, for her hand first.
Mel recalls how her dad flew over from the UK and Murphy booked the dining room at Viceroy L’Ermitage – an old style, upscale hotel in Beverly Hills.
Murphy impressed Martin and asked if he could marry his daughter.
‘Dad said, “Yes.” Which was a relief because I had already designed a beautiful wedding ring from Cartier,’ wrote Mel.
They planned to marry at Christmas. Mel writes that she got pregnant by Murphy while on vacation with him in Mexico in July, 2006 – and that while their relationship ended contentiously, the discovery that she was expecting was a moment of pure joy.
When she took a pregnancy test in her en-suite bathroom in Murphy’s mansion back in LA the line turned blue. She ran over to his en-suite where they ‘jumped around…laughing and crying’ with delight.
Mel says it was Murphy who suggested they marry after months of dating. She writes how the actor asked her father Martin (pictured right with Mel and her ex-husband Stephen Belafonte) for her hand in marriage
In the book, Mel insists she and Murphy were together for nine months total.
‘Eddie made me happier than any man I’d ever met.’ Mel gushed. The relationship was going so well, Mel says, that Murphy soon asked her and her daughter Phoenix to move in with him.
But Mel was reluctant and cracks began to emerge in the relationship – and she calls her life in his home ‘a gilded cage’.
Murphy did not want her to leave the house, even for coffee, saying that someone could fetch it, and was a ‘germ freak’ paranoid about security.
At night, she claims, he had a routine of going round his house making sure everything was locked and double locked.
As the months passed by more issues arose. Mel said she began to dislike living in a crowded house all the time and became acutely aware that a lot of his friends didn’t like her, while she began to dislike following Murphy’s strict rules.
The fact she bought Tampax would get reported back, she claims, Murphy insisted his people book her flights for any trips she took and Mel claims he even had her watched on nights out with friends.
‘Nothing was really in my control,’ she explains, adding: ‘I knew I could never like this and be part of Eddie’s kingdom.’
Mel suggested they buy a house together and split their time between properties, but the idea fell flat with Murphy.
Then in December after the couple had had rows over the house situation, Mel told Murphy she needed a break and was flying back home to Leeds for a few days to think things over.
He asked her: ‘Are you insane? What do you need to think about?’
Mel admits she went into ‘shutdown’ and decided she had to get away.
‘It had all got too much,’ she explains in the book.
Back in Leeds Murphy was calling Mel on her cell constantly, so she switched it off.
Mel B details her romance with the actor in her memoir, Brutally Honest, released on November 27, 2018
He started calling her friends and had a long chat with her mother Andrea, professing his love for her daughter, but still she ignored him for another day.
By the time she cleared her head she jumped back on a flight hoping to make it up with Murphy.
‘I loved this man. He loved me and we would make it work,’ she writes.
What she didn’t know, however, was that as she was on the plane, Murphy was walking the red carpet to promote his film, Dreamgirls.
A Dutch TV reporter approached him, asking about his relationship with Mel.
‘So are you happy with her?’ said the reporter. ‘Because she is pregnant from your child.’
Eddie’s responded: ‘You’re being presumptuous, because we’re not together anymore, and I don’t know whose child that is until it comes out and has a blood test. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions, sir.’
The words sparked a media frenzy and Mel was met by a sea of reporters at LAX airport as she returned from time with her family.
Mel says that to this day she has no clue why he said what he said and his ‘hideous’ words have ‘haunted’ her ever since.
On the way back from the airport Murphy called her. ‘I was caught off guard,’ Murphy said.
‘I didn’t know what was going on with us. I didn’t know what to say.’
She called Murphy one last time later that day and said to him: ‘Thanks a lot. That was really f**king stupid of you to say that. I can’t forgive you for this and I’m going to make you do a DNA test.’
Murphy replied coldly: ‘Well you left me.’ Mel says that she told him that by traveling to see her family she was not ending the relationship, and insists in the book that it was her who then left him.
Mel admits she tried calling him back in the days afterwards to see if she could make amends, but she was met by a wall of silence.
But the fallout had a dramatic impact and she felt judged by others.
She writes: ‘I was a joke. I was a gold-digger. A tramp. A woman who had conned a man into having a baby. A 32-year-old woman soon to give birth to a child whose father had refused to acknowledge or claim.’
Mel gave birth to Angel Iris Murphy Brown, on Murphy’s 46th birthday, April 3, 2007. On June 22, 2007, the star’s reps announced that a DNA test had confirmed that Murphy was the father.
Initially Murphy – who now has nine children with five different women, and whose partner Paige Butcher is expecting his tenth – repeatedly refused to have anything to do with Mel or their child, with reports claiming he insisted that she had tricked him into getting pregnant.
But the actor eventually had a change of heart.
In the book, Mel claims that thanks to his mom, Lillian Lynch, Angel was reunited with her dad in May, 2017 and the two now have a close relationship.
Mel has had to be careful what she says about Murphy in her book, however.
And it’s unclear whether the final version will be different to the draft seen by DailyMailTV.
According to reports the pair struck a 2007 hush deal while coming to a financial settlement over Angel’s child support. Brutally Honest is out on November 27.