Lies , Crying Fit & Drug Benders

KEITH’S SECRET LIFE EXPOSED EXCLUSIVE

Cocaine. Ecstasy. Crack. When Keith Urban moved to Nashville from his native Australia in the ’90s, drugs “were my thing,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016. The country superstar used to get so high, former friend and collaborator Vernon Rust tells In Touch, that Keith thought he had superpowers. “He could see secret, invisible police on roofs, he could see through walls,” Vernon, who often did drugs with Keith, claims. Other times, Keith would smoke crack and go off the grid. “He’d disappear for days,” Vernon alleges. “He’d just lay down in abandoned houses in a fetal position until someone found him alive.”

It’s a miracle he survived. Keith, 49, has been open about his battle with addiction and how his wife of 11 years, Nicole Kidman, 50, “saved” him by staging an interven- tion shortly after they wed in 2006. But now Vernon, a veteran songwriter who hasn’t spoken to Keith in nearly two decades, has come forward with blockbuster details about how the “Cop Car” singer’s drug binges were more frightening than he ever let on. It got so bad that Keith — now a father to Sunday, 9, and Faith, 6, with Nicole — would have a meltdown when he couldn’t get a fi x. “He’d bang his fist on the dashboard of the car and yell, ‘I want some f---ing crack!’” Vernon, who tells all about Keith in his new book, Fake News, reveals to In Touch exclusively. “He’d go into fits, screaming and crying.”

Keith and Vernon met while collaborating on an album for Keith’s band, The Ranch, in 1993. “Every track was coke-fueled,” Vernon claims. “Of the $1 million spent on the recording of it...a fair guess would estimate that at least 25 percent of that money went to [drugs].” But the more Keith consumed, the more he went off the rails. According to Vernon, Keith would swipe drugs from Vernon and their friends. “As soon as he took a big blast of crack,” Vernon describes, “he [thought he] turned invisible, and would steal half the remaining rock in front of us, as if we couldn’t see him.” The guys exacted their revenge on Keith. “We’d replace [the drugs] with carpet glue, wax, insects,” recalls Vernon, “then we’d crack up watching him torch it, bugging his eyes out, his brain expecting a hit his pipe could not deliver.”

Vernon claims the two had a falling-out in 1997 when Keith’s career began to take off. Keith, who was admittedly “insecure” at the time, “would come to resent me for discovering him,” says Vernon, who adds that their friendship officially ended when Keith accused Vernon of stealing money backstage at the Tamworth Country Music Festival in Australia and had him ejected. “Everyone in the music scene was present. I was beaten and literally thrown to the pavement outside,” says Vernon, adding that he last saw Keith the following year when he was checking out of rehab at Nashville’s Cumberland Heights at the same time Keith was checking in. “Keith said, ‘Hey, how’s it going, mate?’ I didn’t respond.”

Keith went to rehab for the last

time in 2006, four months after marrying Nicole. While many people credit Nicole for being the most positive influence on Keith’s life, Vernon is disgusted by how his old friend changed after meeting her. “Keith and Nicole represent everything that is wrong with society — vainglorious attempts to be young, rich and popular,” says Vernon, who writes that the pair “would attend a ‘pond draining’ if a red carpet and a photographer were gonna show up.” If he saw Keith today, Vernon tells In Touch, “I would shake my finger, give him the stink-eye, laugh and walk away.” ◼