What DOES Mel B see in this thug?
Revealed: the very unsavoury past of the husband forced to deny beating up the X Factor judge this week
THE question ‘why does she stay with him?’ has been asked many times this week.
Sullen, aggressive and with a record of violence as long as one of his unnaturally rippling arms, Stephen Belafonte does not, on the face of it, have much to recommend him. Yet Mel B sees qualities in him that no one else does.
The former Spice Girl’s marriage has been under the spotlight after she failed to turn up for last Saturday’s X Factor and viewers were told she had been admitted to hospital.
The following night, she appeared on the show with what appeared to be scratches on her arms and bruising on her cheek.
Her seven-carat diamond wedding ring was not on her finger.
Mel B is yet to explain publicly what happened, but yesterday her mother Andrea, 58, posted two angry messages on her Twitter page which told their own story.
Her first read: ‘little good news 4 me lost half a stone in 1week + will never suffer a vile abusive 3am call from stephan Belafonti (sic) again!!’
The second said: ‘ On average It takes 30 beatings 4 a woman to leave abusive man how sad more should b done 4 these victims!!’
It is unclear what she meant by this, but Belafonte has issued forthright denials that he has hit his wife.
Mrs Brown and her daughter have been estranged since 2008 — a year after Mel and Belafonte married.
After fevered speculation, Belafonte, 39, took to Twitter to deny hitting his wife, also 39, and has repeated those denials angrily to various newspapers this week.
He flew back to the couple’s home in los Angeles a few days ago with their daughter Madison, three, and the family nanny. Mel is thought still to be at their rented flat in Kensington, West london.
All this suggests they have split, although the singer’s representatives refuse to comment. But such is Belafonte’s power over his wife, friends fear that even if they have parted, she will go back to him. So why does she stay? In April 2007 Mel had just given birth to her second daughter, Angel, from her brief relationship with the actor Eddie Murphy. They had split up and Murphy spitefully claimed he didn’t know if he was the father.
Enter Belafonte. Angel was only two weeks old and Stephen would feed the baby, put Mel’s daughter Phoenix, eight, f rom her f i rst marriage to dancer Jimmy Gulzar, to bed and help in the house.
MEl, low and vulnerable, saw him as the man who stepped in to save her. But as one close friend of Mel’s told the Mail this week: ‘ He seems to have this strange hold over her.’
Mel and Belafonte married in June 2007, two months after Angel’s birth. Since then her career has flourished but her personal life, says another friend, is ‘pure Jeremy Kyle’ — much like Stephen Belafonte’s.
This week, the Mail visited the street in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, where Belafonte grew up. Back then he was Stephen Stansbury and lived in a run- down house with his mother, Sheryl, and six siblings.
One neighbour remembers them as the ‘ neighbours from hell’. She says Sheryl was on welfare and the children’s father was an intermittent presence at the house.
The neighbour, who asked to remain anonymous, said the Stansburys arrived in about 1987, when Stephen was 12, and stayed until the mid-1990s. The children were twin boys aged about two, Ruthie, Hannah, Esther, Stephen and Jeremiah. They were allowed to run wild.
One afternoon the woman was in her garden, doing some planting, when she heard the words ‘Pow, you’re dead’ spoken behind her. ‘I looked up and Stephen, who was about 13 or 14, was holding a rifle. The gun looked antiquey so I’ve no idea if it was real. I said to him as casually as I could, “My goodness, that barrel’s almost as tall as you are”. Then I turned away.’
She said Stephen was silent and expressionless during the episode.
The neighbour says ‘dirtbags’ came to the house at all hours. She thinks Stephen took steroids because he went from being ‘a skinny little kid to a huge, barrel- chested man’, though this could have been the result of him working out.
‘The police were coming round all the time and the mother used to go off and leave her kids for days at a time,’ the neighbour says.
The neighbour even went to court to give moral support to a friend who had seen Stephen killing a duck with a cinderblock.
After leaving Point Pleasant aged about 18, Stephen went to California, reinvented himself as Stephen Belafonte (why he chose the name, nobody knows) and set up a film production company, Remag.
In 1993 he was accused of assaulting two men in a row. According to initial charges, he threw a missile at their car. The charge was reduced to vandalism after he agreed to pay for the damage. Then in 2001 he was charged with burglary and theft. The burglary charge was dropped but he was convicted of theft.
Belafonte’s history with women is also chequered.
In 1997 he married his first wife, Nancy Carmell, in las Vegas, where he was to marry Mel B ten years later. It lasted just two months before Ms Carmell fled to her native Honolulu and applied f or the marriage to be annulled. She later said: ‘I just want to forget Stephen.’ Ms Carmell told a friend that Belafonte was ‘emotionally abusive and nothing like the charming person he made himself out to be’.
Belafonte then began a relationship with Nicole Contreras, a bikini model. In 2003 he pleaded ‘ no contest’ — an admission of guilt — to a charge of battery against her.
After their marriage, Mel and Belafonte settled in los Angeles. But court documents seen by this newspaper, which relate to a custody battle with Jimmy Gulzar over Phoenix dating back to 2004, detail the grave concerns of Mel’s mother, Andrea, about Belafonte.
ANdREA, who has long been at loggerheads with her daughter’s husband, was especially worried about Phoenix, now 15. In a declaration made in support of Jimmy Gulzar in 2009 as part of the custody battle (Mel B has sole custody of Phoenix), Mrs Brown said that in 2007, during a visit to los Angeles, Phoenix spoke to her about Belafonte.
‘I was shocked at this time to hear Phoenix say she hated her stepfather Stephan (sic) and I dismissed this as a result of her having to share her mum with him and Angel, but Phoenix has never spoken like that about Petitioner’s (Mel B’s) previous partners.’
There was another alleged conversation the next year, during a visit to Andrea in Britain: ‘Phoenix told me Stephan had a gun and that he had scared her with it.’
later that year the children went to stay with Mel B’s sister, danielle, and Andrea alleged: ‘ While at danielle’s, Phoenix said that Stephan told her that when she is 16, he is going to throw her out of the house.’
Weeks later Mrs Brown took a call from Belafonte in lA. ‘He said I’d never see my grandchildren again.’
By this time Mel was estranged from her family and her ‘Jeremy Kyle’ existence continued. In 2010, while she and Belafonte were on a night out, he got into a fight with a group of men. There have also been rumours of an ‘open’ marriage.
Somehow Mel has kept her career on track. She is a judge on America’s Got Talent and starred in her own reality show, Mel B: It’s a Scary World. She is worth an estimated £35 million and is sensitive to comments that Belafonte ‘lives off her’.
He claims to be a film producer but this week the Franchise Tax Board in California told the Mail that Remag, Belafonte’s production company, was suspended in 2007 for failure to file a tax return.
Belafonte accompanied his wife to Britain in October to start filming The X Factor. According to a source at the show, Mel B was on her way to Wembley Arena on Thursday when she was taken ill . Her concerned driver took her to A&E, where she had tests and was discharged on Sunday.
On Twitter, Belafonte wrote: ‘I will respond to comments of hitting wife which I think are quite disgusting untrue.’ A few days later he said: ‘Who accused me of it, did she accuse me of it, the police, the hospital, who accused me of it?
‘I thought when you beat someone up the police or the hospital or the person you beat up says it.
‘I love my wife. I care about my wife. I’d take a bullet for her.’
In an interview last month with Hello! magazine, Mel said: ‘He’s the first man I’ve ever trusted, he’s my rock and he’s the beginning and the end of who I am.’
That is what worries everyone. Additional reporting: Daniel Bates in New York and Alasdair Glennie