Boris’s wife reveals her vodka binges as couple hit rock bottom
WHEN Boris Becker was declared bankrupt last year after blowing his £100 million fortune, the triple Wimbledon champion’s wife, Lilly, vowed to stand by him.
Now, however, the Dutch model has revealed just how close their marriage came to collapsing — and how the stress drove her to vodka binges.
‘I’ve had a rough year,’ she tells me with some understatement.
‘At first, I let go completely — in every way. Too much drinking, too much smoking, too much going out and not caring. I thought: my life sucks and I’m going to die.’
Lilly, 41, says: ‘Vodka was my friend. I was smoking a pack a day. Boris was going through a bad time in his way, so he didn’t notice. We disconnected and went our own ways.’
After he was declared bankrupt last June, speculation about the state of his marriage to Lilly grew as they were not seen together for months.
Lilly, who has an eight-year- old son, Amadeus, with Becker, 50, says of their annus horribilis: ‘ It affected our lives massively. You find out who your real friends are. I was so ashamed about everything and I thought, “How could this happen?” I felt like my family was under attack.’
Speaking at the Cash & Rocket charity tour launch at 12 Hay Hill, Mayfair, Lilly reveals that she and Becker took drastic measures to save their nineyear marriage.
‘We did couples’ therapy. It was something we never thought we would have to do. It helped. We did an hour a day for five days a week. It was nice to have the input from someone on the outside who doesn’t know you and isn’t biased.
‘If you go through a really s****y time, I’m convinced you have to go through it in your way and hit rock bottom before you can come back. That’s what happened to me.’
Lilly claims she was inspired to curb her drinking and hard partying when she saw the effect it was having on her appearance. ‘I woke up one day, looked in the mirror and realised: enough is enough and nobody feels sorry for you.
‘I looked like s*** and felt like s***, so I stopped the vodka and started exercising again.’
She says she and Boris are now in ‘ a good place’ and hope to have more children, but it won’t be easy due to a serious health condition.
‘I got diagnosed with endometriosis and I had an operation last year to have a cyst removed,’ she discloses. ‘I froze my eggs two years ago, I’ve tried IVF — we’ve done it all.’
Boris has three other children — Noah, 24, and Elias, 18, from his first wife, German-American model Barbara — as well as 17-year-old model Anna following a tryst with Angela Ermakova.
‘After the birth of my son we wanted to have more kids immediately but it didn’t work. I thought: “Hold on, are we not having enough sex?”,’ Lilly continues.
‘Then my cramps were getting worse to the point where I almost fainted and I couldn’t walk.
‘I once collapsed at home. I knew something was off so I went to see the gynaecologist.
‘He said: “There’s a cyst and I’m not sure if it’s serious, but let’s remove it.” I woke up from the operation and he said: “You have grade-three endometriosis.” Thank God I had the money to get the cyst removed.’