RAY CHARLES ROBBED BLIND!
Mistress admits raiding cheapskate’s wallet for cash & replacing $100s with dollar bills
NOTORIOUS cheapskate Ray Charles’ mistress hit the cheating blues legend where it hurt — by stealing his concert money and using the dough to buy a house!
That’s the shocking confession of Marci Soto, now 80, who carried on a torrid, hush-hush 30-year affair with the blind singer who struck it rich with hits like I Got a Woman, Hit the Road Jack and Georgia on My Mind before dying at 73 from liver disease in 2004.
Marci, who has two daughters from a marriage to another man, says she began stealing from Ray after his son Robert, from his second marriage to Della Robinson, blabbed the Soul Man was shacking up with another gal — and bought the bimbo a Mercedes!
Then living in Kirkwood, Mo., with her kids, Marci says she felt “like a woman scorned” and secretly began substituting $1 bills for $100 bills from his concert takes — because Ray couldn’t tell the difference.
“Bobby was telling me all about this lady, and I was just stunned, shocked and hurt,” Marci dishes in an exclusive GLOBE interview.
“My kids were just looking at me on the way home, saying, ‘What are you going to do?’”
The heartbroken woman admits, “I did what I thought would hurt him the most — pay my house off. It wasn’t really a lot of money, because this house isn’t a lot of money.”
She says she didn’t hear from Ray until “six or seven months later,” and he forgave her.
“He called me, and I said, ‘I paid my house off, Ray,’ and he said, ‘I know, babe, that’s fair.’
“I certainly didn’t feel like I was robbing the blind. I felt like he was ready to do something he should have done years earlier.”
She refuses to say how much money she “stole,” but adds, “After that, we were together another 15 years.”
In her 2011 memoir, Ray & Me, she recalls falling in love from afar with the twicedivorced singer — who fathered 12 kids with ten different women — through his music when she was 24 in 1962.
Six years later, married with two daughters and living in New Orleans, she’d had it with her abusive, boozing hubby and sent a full-length photo of herself to Ray’s manager.
Invited to Ray’s hotel, she recalls, “He was standing by the
window ... he turned around ... I walked up to him and said his name. He said, ‘Marci,’ and I thought my heart would stop.”
Soon they were between the sheets, locked in a torrid affair.
Ray invited Marci and her kids to join him in L.A. with a promise to get her a house. Instead, the “stingy” singer gave her $50 to rent an apartment.
Later, she moved to Missouri where Ray frequently visited her and her daughters. She recalls holiday visits with him playing the piano in her basement in his skivvies.
She also confesses she got knocked up with his child, but never told him and secretly had an abortion.
Finally, fed up with his cheating, she says she ended the affair in 1997.
But Marci insists, “I never did steal any money from Ray all the years I was with him except that one time.”