I resented my mum for not rescuing me. We’ve had to rebuild our relationship
SPICE Girl Melanie Brown says she had furious rows with her mum because she wasn’t getting the sympathy she wanted after leaving her abusive marriage.
The pop star, 48, was forced to move into mum Andrea’s bungalow in 2019 with her three kids after her divorce from Stephen Belafonte left her homeless. The ongoing trauma of having survived abuse left Melanie suffering from horrible anger and resentment.
She and her mum had awful rows, as Andrea couldn’t understand why her daughter wasn’t able to move on now she had her freedom, the star admits.
But Melanie says they have successfully rebuilt their relationship, and Andrea often comes over to her farmhouse in West Yorkshire for cups of tea.
ABUSER
The star says: “Rebuilding relationships is hard. When I first moved in with her, my mum would say to me: ‘You’re fine now, you’ve left him, what’s wrong with you?’
“Because on paper I haven’t got the possibility of death over there with my abuser, I’m away from him.
“But it’s not as simple as that. I had this horrible anger towards my mum. I’d tell her, ‘If it was my kids I wouldn’t have let that happen’, and my mum would go, ‘But you did let that happen’.”
Melanie, who split from American Stephen in 2017 after 10 years and moved back to her hometown of Leeds from LA, says she and Andrea got through their problems with re-education.
She says: “When you’re in that place you do want to lash out, because it’s too much to think that you’ve done this. But you haven’t – your abuser has done this to you and your whole circle. I lashed out at my mum a lot, I wasn’t very nice to her. But now I understand.”
Ahead of Mother’s Day, Mel – mum to daughters Phoenix, 25, Angel, 16, and Madison, 12 – shared a video of her and Andrea arranging flowers together.
She laughs: “We do flowers, she helps me do laundry. It’s normal. No parents are perfect, and my mum didn’t truly know what was going on. She had a sense that something really wasn’t right but the distance had already been set anyway.
“She has told me since there wasn’t one night where she could sleep properly, because she was waiting for that phone call. Which is sad.
“Now that I’m more in tune with my body and how I feel, I know that part of my rage towards my mum is because she wasn’t as sympathetic as I wanted.
“She didn’t give me a hug and tell me everything was going to be OK, but that was because she didn’t know if things were going to be OK for me.”
Melanie had to first understand the abuse herself before she could explain it to
Andrea. She says: “There should be support groups that victims of domestic abuse can go to with their families, like there are for alcoholics. Why is there nothing like that for abuse and trauma?” The star is now a passionate advocate for supporting women who have survived abuse. Patron of charity Women’s Aid, she was made an MBE in 2022 for services to charitable causes and vulnerable women. And through her work she recognises the feelings she had in the survivors she meets.
She says: “I met one woman in a refuge who was in exactly the same mindset I was in then – she absolutely hated her mother, and was saying, ‘Why didn’t she come and save me? I’m not going to let her see my kids’. I said to her, ‘You have to calm that down. You don’t know what your abuser said to your mum.’” In 2018, Melanie reached a divorce settlement which involved all abuse charges being dropped. Stephen
Belafonte denies allegations of abuse.
Since rebuilding her life – and releasing her best-selling memoir Brutally Honest – the star, whose hits include Mama, has found love again.
Hairdresser and family friend Rory Mcphee, 36, has supported her tirelessly in spite of all the barriers she put up at the start of their relationship.
She says: “There were times early on when I would flinch at a touch, and I’d have to go, ‘It’s not you’, and he’d go, ‘Let’s talk about it’, and I would explain
when I was touched like that before, this would happen. And he’d say, ‘I would never do that to you.’ He’s kind and caring. This is a guy who doesn’t understand why a man would shout at a woman.”
The couple are set to tie the knot at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, having been granted permission due to her MBE.
She says: “It’s such a beautiful church. I was nervous even going through the process with the chaplain.
But the chaplain actually said, ‘You have a really beautiful relationship’ and seemed really happy for us that we had found each other. “As we walked out, I said to Rory, ‘That was really traditional’, and he said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got your back’.”
The expanded paperback version of Brutally Honest by Melanie Brown and Louise Gannon (Quadrille,) with bonus new chapters is out now