Mel B Says She Tried To End It All While She Was With Stephen Belafonte
Apparently there’s a Sliding Doors-style alternate universe in which Scary Spice is the one that doesn’t come back for a reunion tour. In Mel B’s memoir Brutally Honest, which comes out next week, she says that she once swallowed 200 pills in an attempt to leave her marriage to Stephen Belafonte.
A few months ago, Mel B started promoting her memoir, which is where we learned that she was (then wasn’t) a boozed-up sex-a-holic. This weekend The Sun published a passage in which Mel B describes a really low, dark point in her life back in 2014 when she thought her only escape from her marriage to her (arguably awful) husband was suicide. She says it happened on December 11, 2014, while she was shooting The X Factor in the UK. She came home after dinner with Stephen the night before she was to make a red carpet appearance for the show, and she claims she swallowed 200 Aspirins. Not the celebrity shout-out Bayer probably wanted today.
“As each pill goes into my mouth, I ask myself: ‘Are you sure?’ And I take another one. Ten, 20, 50, 100. ‘Are you sure?’ One hundred and 20. ‘Are you sure?’ 150. ‘Are you sure?’ Behind the glitter of fame, I felt emotionally battered, estranged from my family. I felt ugly and detested by the very man who once promised to love and protect me, my husband and manager Stephen.”
Once Mel B got to pill 200, she says she stopped and realized she didn’t want to die. She says she had to make her “life count,” and that she knew she had to get to the hospital ASAP and get her stomach pumped. She says she pushed against her door, which was jammed, and fell to the floor on her way out. She woke up in the hospital to her daughter Phoenix asking why she’d done it.
Mel B claims that all that pushing against the door to get out left her with a ton of bruises. On December 14th, Mel B appeared on The X Factor live covered in bruising that left people wondering what happened to her. Mel writes that she felt empowered by having everyone see the evidence of what happened.
“I would stand proud in this stunning white dress, the marks of my agony all over me. I asked for my hair to be pulled right back from my face. I needed to be seen. I needed all those bruises to be seen. My message to the world and to my husband was going to be VERY CLEAR. I wanted people out there watching to be my witnesses. I took off my vast, square-cut diamond wedding ring. A ring I’d worn on The X Factor a few weeks before to show the world what a solid couple Stephen and I were…I’ve sent my message to Stephen. There’s no going back. I’m going to leave him, get a divorce. I’m going to be free.”
Mel B did eventually leave and file for divorce, about two years and three months later.
The rumor about Mel’s bruises the time was that she ended up in the hospital because Stephen was an abusive husband. This was compounded by a tweet from Mel B’s estranged mother in which she more than implied Stephen was no good, and claimed to have phone messages of him being verbally abusive. Stephen swore in a series of tweets that he wasn’t the reason Mel was in the hospital (okay, well technically not, maybe). Mel B then left Stephen on December 16th. Two weeks after that, Mel B reunited with Stephen and swore he’d never laid a hand on her.
According to Mel, Stephen really wasn’t the reason for why she showed up to The X Factor with bruises. And all this time, I was staring suspiciously at Stephen like he was the guilty husband in a Lifetime movie. I mean, he still allegedly was, thanks to some rumored sexual blackmail. But now I guess he’s more of a Saturday afternoon Lifetime husband, and not the primetime Thursday night full-on evil kind.
Pic: Wenn.com/FayesVision