Mel B and world’s nastiest divorce
Drugs, violence and threesomes with the nanny. Feminist icon Mel B’s split from her husband has already been spectacularly toxic. Now with a court case imminent, it’s going to get even more vicious. So much for Girl Power!
Given the revelations emerging almost daily about Melanie Brown’s chaotic private life, it’s hard to countenance that she was once regarded as a role model for a generation of adolescent girls. exploding onto the pop scene 20 years ago, as Mel B of the Spice Girls, this daughter of a factory worker, raised in a Leeds redbrick terrace, carried the torch for millions of impressionable young fans who bought into her brash self-confidence.
With her leopard print jumpsuits, wild Afro hair and in-your-face exuberance, it was ‘Scary Spice’ who epitomised the group’s crusade for ‘girl power’; a mantra that became the zeitgeist for many schoolchildren during the mid-nineties.
One wonders what those same girls — now in their 30s, with careers and families — must make of their erstwhile idol today.
As a judge on Simon Cowell’s reality Tv show, America’s Got Talent, Mel might still play the arch-feminist who invariably gets what she ‘really, really wants’.
Yet she has become embroiled in a sordid and humiliating divorce battle, as well as other related legal cases, which portray her in a very different light.
We have been given exclusive access to sensational pieces of evidence expected to be presented during the proceedings, which were due to start on Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, but have now been put off until next month.
They allege that Melanie Brown, now 42, is a woman who fell prey to her insatiable carnal desires, as well as the predations of many people with whom she surrounded herself.
indeed, her story reveals much about the tawdry underbelly of today’s showbusiness culture.
At the heart of the case next month is Mel B’s application for a restraining order against her second husband, film producer Stephen Belafonte, whom she is divorcing after a ten-year ‘open’ marriage that is said to have seen them engage in a menage-a-trois with their young German nanny.
Already, Hollywood gossip columnists are bracing themselves for daily dirt-slinging.
The scene will be a small, woodpanelled room in Department 64 of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, where several previous celebrity divorces have been resolved, including last year’s bitter split between actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard. B eLAfOnTe, who has a string of criminal convictions, including one for assaulting a former partner, is expected to claim the singer has been an alcoholic and drug addict — allegations she strenuously denies — with an insatiable urge for video-taped threesomes.
for her part, she is expected to depict him as a devious wifebeater whose affair with the nanny, Lorraine Gilles, now 26, drove her to the brink of suicide.
We have been shown several of the videos due to be played in court to support his case. Whatever the rights and wrong of this story, they make it clear that infidelity was an accepted part of the Spice Girl’s marriage.
Another video shows the couple arguing furiously as Belafonte clutches a packet of white powder — alleged, in court documents, to be cocaine.
But the most poignant piece of footage shows the pair arguing in the presence of their six-year-old daughter, Madison. According to a source close to Belafonte, these damning films are ‘potentially career-endingly bad’ for the judge of a prime-time U.S. talent show aimed at a family audience.
it could hardly be a less dignified end to the singer’s second marriage.
She divorced the Spice Girls dancer Jimmy Gulzar — father of her 18-year-old daughter Phoenix Chi — in 2000 after a stormy twoyear marriage, and then had a series of high-profile liaisons, including among her conquests the British actor Max Beesley, and Princess Diana’s former fitness guru Jason Steele.
But the affair that raised eyebrows came in 2006, after she had moved to Los Angeles. Parading in a bikini, she announced that she was in love with the A-list actor eddie Murphy, star of Beverly Hills Cop.
She became pregnant but the multi-millionaire dumped her — effectively breaking the news to her during a Tv interview in which he suggested the forthcoming baby might not be his.
it was only after a DnA test that he conceded being the father of their daughter Angel, now aged ten.
So it was that she found herself divorced, humiliated and a single mother to two daughters. By then, too, the zenith of her ‘Girl Power’ fame was very much past.
Perhaps that’s why, in the summer of 2007, Melanie was susceptible to the charms of Stephen Belafonte, an American movie producer.
Having comforted her over her draining paternity battle with eddie Murphy, Belafonte then proposed marriage by hiding an engagement ring in her cocktail glass during a romantic dinner.
They were married that August, in a Las vegas wedding chapel famed for its gimmicky services, with elvis Presley lookalike pastors a speciality.
Almost immediately, unflattering stories began to emerge about the small-time film producer. He was revealed to have criminal convictions for assaulting a previous partner (who branded him a ‘psycho’ and described how he attacked her frenziedly during a drunken rage); receiving stolen property; and hurling an object at a car speeding along a motorway.
Bizarrely, police in his home town, in new Jersey, also declared that he was wanted for failing to pay a $300 fine for battering a duck to death with a brick.
Then there were issues about his surname. Acquaintances suggest he changed it from Stansbury to Belafonte in an attempt to enhance his career, by passing himself off as a relative of the legendary singer, actor and social activist, Harry Belafonte.
Back in Yorkshire, Mel B’s family were horrified when they learned of his past. Her mother, Andrea, surmised that Melanie had been ‘taken in’ by Belafonte because her ‘hormones were all over the place after the baby’ she’d had by eddie Murphy.
Yet Mel leapt to her husband’s defence. ‘everything i stand for is about being a strong, independent woman,’ she declared, echoing her old Spice Girl mantra. ‘So for him to be seen as a wife-beater is devastating for me — because he is not, and never has been.’
examining the documents filed in the impending divorce case, it is apparent these were words she may regret. into this chaotic story now entered Lorraine Gilles, an eye-catchingly beautiful young German girl.
According to her court testimony, she first met Belafonte and the singer in 2009 in a Los Angeles restaurant, where they struck up a conversation with her after remarking on her German accent. A T THe time, Gilles says, she was a naïve, 18year-old student from a small town in Germany, on an exchange visit to the U.S. to improve her english.
When the couple invited her to their home, she readily accepted, but after drinking, the three had sex together — at Mel’s request, she claims.
Thereafter, Mel would invite her to her house for more such sessions, explaining that she and her husband ‘had an open relationship’.
Sometimes she would also be asked to look after the children. (As well as Phoenix Chi, who was then ten, and eddie Murphy’s two-year-old child, Melanie and Belafonte had a daughter, Madison, in 2011.)
Six months later, Lorraine Gilles had to return to Germany; but when the couple offered her a job as a nanny she returned, working for them for seven years, during which sex sessions with Mel, and sometimes her husband, became commonplace.
in her court statement, she describes Mel as a ‘mentor’ who took her on her travels, and taught her about family life, and the entertainment business, as well as love-making.
She insists in the court papers that she never slept with Belafonte without the ‘knowledge or participation’ of Mel, who would often ‘take part in the menage-atrois herself’.
Gilles also recounts how Melanie paid for her to have an abortion in 2014, reportedly costing $240,000 with private after-care.
it has always been rumoured that the baby was Belafonte’s, but the nanny insists she fell pregnant following a one-night stand with a stranger.
Whatever the truth, Mel’s version of events differs markedly from the nanny’s.
She claims her husband paid Gilles ‘inordinate amounts of money’ — from her earnings — supposedly to look after the children, when in reality he had taken Gilles in as his mistress and planned for the nanny to replace her. When his ploy became
apparent to Mel, in 2015, she tried to fire Gilles, but Belafonte ‘went ballistic’, so she re-instated her, and their extraordinary domestic arrangement ‘fell back in the same old pattern’. Feeling untouchable now, Gilles became ‘manipulative and demanding’, she claims. But last September, a few months before the marriage ended, Mel sacked her. According to the nanny, Mel’s version of events is false and portrays her as a ‘home-wrecker, prostitute and extortionist’. So it is that she’s suing the former Spice Girl for defamation. The singer has countered by filing a restraining order against Gilles (who has since married a friend — some say this was simply to gain U.S. residency). Given the explosive nature of the evidence, supported by 2,100 exhibits including emails, letters, and those prurient home videos, the case is being billed as Hollywood’s most sensational divorce battle of the year.
The colourful cast of witnesses makes it still more intriguing. It includes the former ‘It Girl’, Lady Victoria Hervey, daughter of the 6th Marquis of Bristol, who has admitted being among the many women alleged to have engaged in threesomes with Mel B and her husband, and a new York rap artist called Siya Sherman, who claims to have witnessed drug-taking.
Inevitably, lawyers for all parties are talking up their chances of victory.
Approached after a procedural hearing last week, Melanie’s attorney, Larry Bakeman, said: ‘Stephen Belafonte can fabricate everything he wants. Let’s see if he can present evidence in a court of law. There’s an old saying: “Put your money where your mouth is.” ’
Whatever the coming weeks hold, however, we can make some predictions. Belafonte, now 42, will doubtlessly move on to some new woman. The nanny appears to be relishing life as a California beach babe and paparazzi magnet, and when the case is over, lucrative offers for her story will doubtless be tabled.
As for Mel B, though she’s reputed to earn more than £2 million a year, she is said to be struggling financially, having frittered much of her £50 million fortune in pursuit of pleasure — not to mention exorbitant legal fees. M ORe than half of her income derives from America’s Got Talent, but it remains to be seen whether Simon Cowell’s loyalty will hold up if the reputation of his star judge is very publicly trashed in court.
Whether she can overcome the problems that have vexed her in recent years remains to be seen.
Speaking to us this week, Mel’s first husband, dancer Jimmy Gulzar, made disturbing claims about her behaviour in front of their 18-year-old daughter, Phoenix Chi.
He also suggested the former Spice Girl was teetering dangerously on the brink of a ‘Britney Spears-style breakdown’ — referring to the way the American singer shaved her head and was sectioned over her erratic behaviour nearly ten years ago.
‘It’s only going to get worse and worse,’ Gulzar, now 50, told us. ‘My biggest concern is that Melanie is not mentally fit enough for what’s waiting for her.’
He says he has tried in vain since May to contact child protection services in Los Angeles to see if his daughter needs help.
no matter who wins the case, all the main players in this unedifying saga will surely emerge as losers. For this story serves only to highlight the moral bankruptcy of modern-day celebrity, and the ruinous effects of promiscuity — especially when children are caught in the fallout. So much for ‘girl power’.