MEL’S HELL

Spice Girl tells of drugs, sex tapes, a suicide bid Former Spice Girl Mel B tells how her life has spiralled out of control over the past decade in a startling new memoir. Alison Boshoff reports

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 exhusband Stephen Belafonte and a suicide attempt in which she describes taking an overdose.

Telling the story of her carcrash 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 $140 million fortune and left with just $1400 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.

Perhaps extraordinarily, the 43-year-old claims she spilt 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 may be financially motivated. In an interview she gave this weekend, she told how extricating herself from her 10-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 $6700 a month in child support for their daughter Madison, who is seven. She was also ordered to pay his $475,000 legal fees.

When their house in Los Angeles sells, he will get half of the proceeds — $5.25 million. She also has to pay her own legal bills, said to stand at almost $1.75 million.

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 $3.7 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 $35 million to $50 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 $350,000 armoured car.

Or how about the $43,000 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 is an unsavoury character who is blamed by Mel and her family for creating a painful 10year rift. So how did this personal nightmare unfold?

THE TAINTED LOVE STORY

SHE and Belafonte were married in June 2007 in a $50 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.

Mel, whose daughter Angel with Eddie is now 11, said in an interview 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.”

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 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. One shared lover was nanny Lorraine Gilles, 27, who worked for Mel for seven years.

In court papers, Mel claimed Gilles and Belafonte had plotted to make sex tapes featuring her. This is denied by Gilles, who said that the sex was consensual, and that the main partner was actually Mel.

Extraordinarily, Gilles is not mentioned in the book.

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 current defamation suit against the former Spice Girl. 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 visi- bly diminished. “It was wrong from the beginning,” he added. “We all had our suspicions that something very ugly was playing out behind closed doors.”

Mel 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.

Belafonte, 43, has continued to deny it all. SNORTING 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.” 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.

She said that after taking an overdose, she told Belafonte what she had done.

In court documents, she claimed that he told her “Die b....” and tried to stop her going to hospital.

He said 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.”

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.”

I felt ugly and detested by the very man who once promised to love and protect me