Myleene: ‘I turned to drink as split overwhelmed me’
MYLEENE Klass has admitted turning to drink due to the stress of the bitter divorce from Dubliner Graham Quinn that left her life spiralling out of control.
The 40-year-old pop star-turned-broadcaster said the support of her friends saved her from ‘selfdestruct’ after her marriage to Mr Quinn broke down. She would start drinking before 11am and struggled to go more than a few hours without alcohol.
Ms Klass spoke about the humiliation she felt following the divorce and how she was struggling financially.
Having always been candid about the acrimonious nature of the split, she has now opened up about the devastating impact the break-up had on her mental health.
She said she reached the bottom when in a car taking her to television studios. ‘I was doing Divorce: Myleene and Graham breakfast TV, and the guy opened the door, and I just took a breath because I thought, “I can’t get out of the car”,’ she said on Kate Thornton’s White Wine Question Time podcast.
‘I was in the middle of a divorce, I was trying to get my kids balanced, my finances were spiralling, because you’re thinking, “I’m going to lose everything”.’
Ms Klass and Mr Quinn, a tour security manager, have two daughters together – Ava, 11, and Hero, seven. They married in 2011 but he left her six months later on her 34th birthday and they divorced in 2013.
On the split, the former Hear’Say star said: ‘The humiliation, you’ve got people looking at you, blaming you without a clue as to what the f*** is going on...
‘I didn’t want it [divorce] to define me, but it did change me irrevocably. I’ve never ever been in the position where I’ve had to ask people for help.’
On her drinking, Ms Klass said: ‘I remember waking up and thinking it’s okay to have a drink at 11am, because I hadn’t had a drink in five hours’.
The TV star was thrown into financial peril after the split, with her reported €12.5million fortune put in jeopardy as she had refused to consider a pre-nuptial agreement.
She is now happily dating PR boss Simon Motson.