What’s the truth about married rock star now accused of pursuing FOUR other women?
First, Moves Like Jagger singer Adam Levine faced one bombshell allegation. Yesterday, the floodgates opened. So...
WOne claims he wanted to give his new baby her name
HEN Victoria’s Secret model Behati Prinsloo gushed to TV chat show queen Ellen DeGeneres three years ago that she would love to have a big family with her pop star husband Adam Levine, she did at least admit to having one reservation. He had a tendency to come up with truly bizarre names for their children.
They discussed how it had in fact been DeGeneres, a friend of Levine, who’d suggested ‘Dusty Rose’ (after British singer Dusty Springfield) to him for their first daughter and how the frontman of pop rock mega-band Maroon 5 enthusiastically went with it.
But the Namibian-born Prinsloo admitted that, coming as she did from solid Afrikaner farmer stock, she’d initially been very sceptical about such Hollywood affectation. What would her parents — her father is a church minister, her mother runs a B&B — think, she wondered, and concluded: ‘Dusty? No way.’
But she gradually warmed to it and they went on to have another daughter, whose name, Gio Grace, also sounds like it came from Levine.
It’s now safe to assume, however, that with a third child due soon, Dad has been relieved of baby-naming duties for the
foreseeable future. For, according to Sumner Stroh, a 23-year-old model and social media star, the heavily tattooed singer had a year-long affair with her after he convinced her his marriage had crumbled. Not only that but, as Prinsloo,
34, became pregnant for a third time, Stroh claims Levine had got back in touch with her to say he wanted to call the baby — if it was a boy — after her.
We don’t know for certain whether ‘ Sumner’ has indeed been floated as a potential baby name around the couple’s $52 million Montecito mansion home in recent months, but it’s certainly true that Ms Stroh’s sensational accusations have not gone unremarked chez Levine.
The 43-year-old American singer, estimated to be worth $160 million (£140 million), has publicly
insisted he didn’t ‘cheat’ on his wife, although he admits he ‘crossed the line’ with Stroh.
Levine — who has penned such hits as Girls Like You, Never Gonna Leave This Bed and Won’t Go Home Without You — said he and his wife are working to sort out their eight-year marriage ‘together’.
But that was before three more women — one of them his former yoga instructor — yesterday
came forward with their own allegations of his lecherous behaviour.
While Maroon 5 have sold more than 135 million records, the frontman has long been famous as much for his girlfriends as for his hits.
And it isn’t the first time the rakish pop star, whose premarriage romantic life was an exhausting array of swimsuit models, cocktail waitresses and
blonde actresses including Cameron Diaz and Jessica Simpson, has had to defend his love life.
To borrow the title of one of Maroon 5’s biggest hits, Moves
Like Jagger, Levine certainly appears intent on emulating the bed-hopping antics of the Rolling Stones singer when it comes to women. In a 2012 interview, Levine admitted he’d had a ‘promiscuous’ phase and attributed his desire to sleep with so many women to the fact that he ‘loved them so much’.
Three years earlier, he told Cosmopolitan that men, himself included, couldn’t help cheating.
‘Instinctively, monogamy is not in our genetic make-up,’ he intoned authoritatively. ‘ People cheat. I
have cheated. And you know what? There is nothing worse than the feeling of doing it.’
That last statement may, in his case, be treated with a little caution given the weight of allegations he now faces.
Levine’s nightmare started on Monday when Sumner Stroh posted a video on the social media
site TikTok revealing their alleged affair just five days after Prinsloo had announced she and Levine were expecting their third child.
The video — posted just two days before Dusty’s sixth birthday — ‘went viral’ and has been watched more than 21 million times.
Ms Stroh didn’t say when she had an affair with Levine but wrote: ‘At the time, I was young and naive.’ She said Levine had ‘exploited’ and ‘manipulated’ her, adding: ‘I’m just going to rip the Band-Aid off.’
A social media influencer and ‘Instagram model’ who has 430,000 followers, she included in her video what appeared to be a string of lubricious Instagram messages between her and the singer’s verified account.
‘It is unreal how f***ing hot you are. Like it blows my mind,’ he wrote in one exchange, adding:
‘You are 50 times hotter in person. And so am I hahaha.’
She says they lost contact ‘over a period of months’ only for Levine
to get back in touch this year to tell her he and
Prinsloo were expecting their third child.
‘OK serious question,’ he wrote. ‘I’m having another baby and if it’s w [sic] boy I really wanna name it Sumner. You OK with that? DEAD serious.’
Ms Stroh went on: ‘I was like “I’m in Hell”. I have to be in Hell at this point . . . My morals were unknowingly compromised, I was completely manipulated.’
She added that she only went public about their alleged affair after a friend with whom she’d
shared some of the incriminating text messages threatened to sell the story to the media. In a followup video post she said she felt ‘remorseful’ and ‘disgusted with myself’ but said she had ‘ been under the impression that their marriage was over’ and the couple were keeping it quiet to avoid bad publicity. ‘I was new to LA and just assumed that with celebrities of that calibre, that’s how it was,’ she explained. ‘And that’s why I feel
exploited because he knew that I believed everything he said.’
As soon as she realised his marriage wasn’t over, she ended the relationship, she said.
The singer replied with a statement on Tuesday which began: ‘A lot is being said about me right now and I want to clear the air.’
He went on: ‘I used poor judgment in speaking with anyone other
than my wife in ANY kind of flirtatious manner. I did not have
an affair, nevertheless, I crossed the line during a regrettable period in my life.’
His behaviour had ‘in certain instances’ been ‘inappropriate’, he said, but he had taken ‘proactive steps to remedy this with my family’. He added: ‘My wife and my family is all I care about in this world. To be this naive and stupid
enough to risk the only thing that truly matters to me was the greatest mistake I could ever make.
‘ I will never make it again. I take full responsibility. We will get through it. And we will get through it together.’ He’d barely pressed ‘send’ on this heartfelt statement to a showbusiness news site when other women started unhelpfully piping up about their own alleged experiences of his ‘inappropriate’ behaviour.
Within hours, a heavily tattooed and curvaceous comedian named simply Maryka leaked online screenshots of lecherous Instagram messages she claimed Levine had sent her.
‘Holy ****ing ****. The body of yours is absurd. How are you such an hourglass?’ said one, adding: ‘I’d do anything for it. I’d buy it a steak dinner and whisper sweet nothings into it.’
Another reportedly read: ‘Watching your a*s jiggle on that table will permanently scar me.’ When, after the star allegedly said he was ‘obsessed’ with her, she asked: ‘Dude aren’t you like married lol?’ He replied: ‘It’s a bit complicated.’
Another woman, Alyson Rose — once again, tattooed, pouting and curvy — posted what she alleged to be her own lascivious online communications from Levine after getting to know him via his tattoo artist.
In messages, he allegedly called her ‘ hot’ and asked for more
‘It’s unreal how hot you are. It blows my mind’
pictures of her. In one, he reportedly told her: ‘I shouldn’t be talking to you you know [that] right?’
Ms Rose claimed there was ‘a lot more that was said that was not appropriate’ but she had felt uncomfortable about sharing it.
And then his former yoga teacher, Alanna Zabel, said she’d also been the recipient of his advances. Zabel, who
trained the singer from 2007 to 2010 — before he married Behati
— said he once told her he wanted to ‘spend the day with you naked’ and told her that he often boasted to his friends about how she had the
‘best a*** in town’.
She said that her exboyfriend saw the offending ‘naked’ text message, and — when she asked Levine to confirm he’d
messaged her by accident — her ex flew into a rage and they had a violent altercation.
When she told Levine what had happened, saying she expected he’d
accidentally sent her a message intended for his then girlfriend, he didn’t reply. Instead, she said, he abandoned her, leaving her off his entourage for a forthcoming band tour, all of which had a ‘massive life-changing, destructive’ effect on her life.
‘Long overdue #ExposeAdamLevine,’ she wrote on social media.
In fact, Levine waxed lyrical about the benefits of yoga in a 2008 interview,
adding: ‘But let’s face it, I only practise yoga because the classes are always packed with beautiful women.’
His original accuser, Sumner Stroh, had her own scornful response to
Levine’s affair denials. ‘Someone get this man a dictionary,’ she said.
A source close to Levine told People magazine yesterday that the star
‘swears’ to friends that he was ‘flirtatious’ with three women, including Ms Stroh, but that ‘nothing physical happened’. The insider said Levine craves female attention ‘more than most’. People also said that Behati was ‘very upset’ at the developments.
Music industry observers have been predicting for years that it is long overdue its own ‘#MeToo moment’ when, as in Hollywood after the Harvey Weinstein scandal, predatory sexual behaviour would be called to account.
Levine and Behati first got together in 2012, shortly after he broke up with
another well-known model, Russianborn Anne Vyalitsyna.
Although they split up briefly in May the following year, Levine and Behati
reunited and got married in front of 275 guests in Mexico in July 2014. Levine had a raucous bachelor party with 50 friends in Las Vegas but later said he’d had enough carousing and wanted to settle down with Behati.
‘I definitely feel like I’m sitting in the chair I’m supposed to be sitting in,’ he confided. In 2018, the couple moved into a three- acre, ranch- style compound in LA’s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, buying it for $32 million (£25 million) from a showbusiness couple — Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner — whose own marriage had collapsed.
In May, the Levines made a huge profit by re- selling it for $51 million (£40 million) and paying just $1 million more for a mansion up the Pacific
coast in even quieter Montecito, home of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
On Tuesday, at least, they were all smiles as they were photographed picking up the children from school together, ready for Dusty’s birthday the following day.
Adam Levine said in 2020 he wanted to have five children with Behati but admitted — jokingly — that he risked being ‘punched in the ****ing face’ by
his figure- conscious wife if he asked for another.
The risk of further blows has surely risen dramatically now.