Mel B on domestic abuse, trauma and recovery: ‘In my mind there was no way out’

Melanie Brown is in her tracksuit talking to me from her Leeds home. Her mother has popped round and is chomping away on an Easter egg she has just found, despite the fact that Brown has made her some “amazing” spicy curry soup for lunch. Her oldest daughter, Phoenix, is going to extreme measures to get her attention. Meanwhile, tiny yorkshire terrier Cookie has jumped into Brown’s arms, as her French bulldogs Yoshi and Yoda and golden doodle Luna wander around making mischief. It’s a picture of contented domestic chaos.

But it wasn’t always like this. Four years ago Brown, better known as Mel B or Scary Spice, was living in Los Angeles, married to the American film producer Stephen Belafonte and, she says, terrified for her life. In her 2018 memoir Brutally Honest, she documented the horror of her day-to-day existence – alleging physical, sexual, verbal and financial abuse.

Over the previous decade her life had become an elaborate lie as she announced to the world she had never been happier than with Belafonte. And yet she was seen with bruises on her face and arms, and stories emerged about how the famously extroverted Brown had become withdrawn and remote.

I experienced the deceit first-hand. The first time I interviewed her, in 2014, she presented her life as one long hedonistic, sex-tastic idyll. When I talked to her in 2018 she apologised and admitted it had been a pack of lies – the only way she knew to hide her shame and, more importantly, to survive. “It was my duty to lie because in my mind there was no way out,” she says today. “You’re living in a nightmare, and then tell the outside world that everything is fine because you’re so embarrassed, and riddled with guilt, and worried that nobody’s going to believe you.” There were times, Brown says, she thought Belafonte would kill her, and other times when she felt suicidal.

Back in 2018 she was still loud, funny and filthy, but there was also something fragile about her. She had only recently come out of the relationship, and the trauma was just beginning to hit her. Today she seems stronger.

For the past three years she has had little time for music or television, apart from a Spice Girls reunion tour and an appearance in the talent show The Masked Singer. When she has not been focusing on rebuilding herself and her relationship with her family, she has been campaigning against domestic violence. Brown works with the charity Women’s Aid, telling her story about domestic abuse and encouraging others to tell theirs. She has just made a devastating four-minute film about domestic abuse, Love Should Not Hurt. It is wordless and accompanied by a gorgeous piano soundtrack composed by Fabio D’Andrea, who also directed the film. The juxtaposition of gently entrancing music and chilling imagery works brilliantly, as we see a successful, wealthy woman kicked, punched and spat on by her partner. At the same time the couple present an image of enraptured bliss to friends. The film ends with a sobering statistic from the World Health Organization: one in three women globally are subjected to physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, or sexual violence from a non-partner.

For so long, Brown says, she believed she was alone – convinced that nobody would understand how she got into that situation. Then she met up with a group of abuse survivors at a refuge in Leeds. “There were around 20 women sitting cross-legged on the floor and we all told our story. I told mine, then one woman went: ‘Oh my God, I went through the same thing. He took my car keys away on week three.’ We all had exactly the same story.”

Brown and Belafonte were together for 10 years. At first, she says, she really did believe he was wonderful. He told her that everything he did was because he loved her and he wanted to make life easier for her. She hadn’t heard of the term coercive control. “It starts with tiny things,” she says. Such as? “‘Oh, don’t wear that dress – I’ve bought you this dress.’” Telling you what to wear is not so tiny, I say. “It wasn’t like: ‘Put this dress on!’ It was: ‘Look what I’ve bought for you! I saw you looking at it on Net-a-Porter.’ And you think: ‘Oh my God, that’s so sweet!” when actually they’re starting to take over everything.”

Brown says he insisted she wore certain colours. “For the first year when I left my ex, I would only wear white because I felt I was clearing myself of that.” And there is another reason, she says: “I didn’t even know what colour I liked any more because those choices were taken away from me for so long. And I just accepted it.” She was so desperate to escape reminders of Belafonte that she had a tattoo saying “Stephen, till death do us part, you own my heart” cut out and had her vagina surgically scraped and new tissue put in.

She had no self-esteem left. “I felt so much self-hate. I’d lied to so many people. Then I felt very angry that I’d let that person get away with all that for 10 years.” She admits she ignored a warning from Belafonte’s previous partner that he had a history of domestic violence. “My then-husband said: ‘Oh, she’s crazy.’ And he was so convincing. I believed him over her. I was frightened to believe her.” In 2003, Belafonte did not contest a charge of beating his then partner, the model Nicole Contreras.

Brown was ashamed of what she had become. And that shame was heightened by her former sense of self. She wasn’t simply a Spice Girl – she was Scary Spice, who roared with confidence in her leopard-print outfits, showed her claws and told it as it was. Away from the stage, she was the strong, independent woman with three children from three men (22-year-old Phoenix’s father is Brown’s ex-husband, the dancer Jimmy Gulzar; 14-year-old Angel’s father is actor-comedian Eddie Murphy; and nine-year-old Madison’s father is Belafonte). She was fearless. Until Belafonte came along.

The strange thing is, she says, that before marrying Belafonte she knew so little about domestic abuse. Strange because she had grown up next to a refuge for battered women. Brown was raised in Leeds by her white, Yorkshire-born mother, Andrea, and her black father, Martin, who was from Saint Kitts and Nevis. Her family was huge, close and gregarious – her mother is one of seven children, and she grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins. It’s only recently that she has started thinking about the refuge and the boy she briefly befriended there. “I’d never understood why Billy was there for only two weeks and when I went to play with him he was gone. It was a safe house. I knew there was somewhere women would flee to, but I never really understood it growing up. I never totally understood it till I was in my own situation.”

After marrying Belafonte, she became more and more remote from her family. “He’d say: ‘Why are you calling your mum today? Come on, let’s go out.’ Then you turn around and realise: ‘Shit, I used to call my mum every day; I haven’t spoken to her in a week!’ Then that becomes a month and two months.” It was only when she began speaking to abuse victims in Leeds that she realised how common coercive control is. “It’s like abusers have all read the same handbook. Before you know it you don’t have your own front door key, or you don’t even drive your own car any more. Those ‘privileges’ which we worked so hard to get – your nice car, your nice house – are slowly taken away from you. Your power is taken away and the only person you have to rely on is your abuser.” She doesn’t once refer to Belafonte by name.

In 2017, hours before a trial relating to the alleged domestic violence was due to start in Los Angeles, Brown and Belafonte reached a private settlement. She had accused him of drugging her, hitting her, choking her and forcing her to make more than 20 sex tapes. He denied the allegations, and claimed she was addicted to cocaine and alcohol, impairing her ability to look after her children. Brown has admitted that at her nadir she would snort cocaine for breakfast. Before gaining joint custody of Madison, she had to undergo four months of drug and alcohol tests to prove she was clean.

Brown, 45, says she is still trying to work out why it took her so long to walk out on him. “I tried to leave seven times, so you can imagine how desperate I was in those 10 years. I didn’t have anywhere to go, I didn’t have my own credit card, I didn’t have a car, I’ve got three kids, I was very on the edge of self-destruction.” How close did she come to killing herself? “I self-medicated. I tried everything but trying to end it all, because that to me would mean he would win.” Most importantly, it would have left her daughters without a mother. “It seems like the simplest thing, get up and leave, but when you’ve got kids involved there’s other coercive control that comes on top of it, like: ‘I’m going to take your kids away, I’m going to tell everyone you’re a drug addict and alcoholic’ – which he did.”

Mel B with the Women’s Aid report on domestic abuse, at Downing Street in 2019. Photograph: Sonja Horsman

She adds: “The abuse was directed at me – it was never on my kids. But obviously my kids heard things and they saw things.”

In the end, she left when she heard her father was dying from cancer. She rushed from LA to Leeds to see him one last time. He hadn’t spoken for months and had been in a coma. She says he opened his eyes and told her he loved her; she told him she was finally leaving Belafonte.

Brown is particularly concerned about domestic abuse at the moment because of the pandemic. In March, Refuge, which runs the national domestic abuse helpline, reported a 61% increase in calls and contacts logged over the previous year. In January, Women’s Aid reported that some domestic abusers were using the lockdown rules to intensify or conceal violence, coercion and control.

“The pandemic has heightened everything,” Brown says. “It’s like an abuser’s dream. They don’t have to tell their partner: ‘You’re staying in because I told you.’ They could just say: ‘You’re staying in because of lockdown. It’s not just my rules now – it’s the government’s rules.’ I’m four years out of an abusive relationship. If that was me four years ago in lockdown, I don’t think I would have survived. My work was my salvation. Being on TV and doing what I loved was the one thing he couldn’t touch, the one time he had no say on what I wore, how I did my hair, what I said.” She pauses. “Nine times out of 10 I’d get home and have to deal with it then.”

Brown does believe there is cause for optimism in the shape of the new Domestic Abuse Act, designed to protect those who experience domestic abuse and strengthen measures to tackle perpetrators. “It’s not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction,” Brown says. While it covers coercive control and economic abuse, which Brown regards as big victories, the act doesn’t provide access to legal services for migrants.

I notice Brown looking away from the camera, and for the first time today there is that familiar roar of laughter. It’s a welcome relief. “Phoenix!” She turns back to Zoom. “Phoenix is flashing me! This is so inappropriate.” Phoenix tells her she’s off to the park. “What park are you going to? Ah, don’t leave me.” But Phoenix is off. “She’s 22,” she says, as if she can’t quite believe it. “My gosh!”

When she returned to Leeds, she says her mother assumed she would make a quick recovery now she was safe. But Brown knew it wouldn’t be so simple. “My mother said: ‘You’re going to be fine now – you’re back home.’ And I thought, I know I’m not fine. I jump when somebody comes into the room, I wake up in night sweats still thinking I’m back in that bed in LA. There are so many things that have an after-effect that will probably go on for my entire life. I just have to learn how to deal with it. You can’t erase those kind of traumas.” Does she still have nightmares? “Not so much now. It was nearly every night. Now it’s maybe twice a month.”

Brown had planned to return to LA after a couple of weeks. But to her surprise Phoenix and Angel wanted to stay in Leeds. (Madison has been in LA for the past six months.) To her even greater surprise, she moved back in with her mother for the first time since she was 16.

I ask whether she has learned to trust people again. To an extent, she says. “I have a very different life to the one I had in LA. In LA you’re surrounded by people and you don’t know what their intentions are. Here I’m surrounded by normal, northern, salt-of-the-earth family. So I was really fortunate to be able to just slip back into that. I lived at my mum’s for a year. Bless her, she made me come and live there with my kids. She just wanted to help me build myself back up, remind myself who I was.” Did it feel safe back home? She smiles. “It felt very safe.”

With her mum, Andrea, at the launch of Brutally Honest in 2018. Photograph: Richard Young/REX/Shutterstock

But even here there were problems. She says when she came home she was so angry – at herself, and even at her mother. “I was like: ‘Mum, you were meant to know if I was in trouble – you were meant to have come and saved me.’ She said: ‘I didn’t realise it was that bad.’” Hold on, I say, but when you spoke to her you would tell her you were fine? “Well, sometimes I’d call her crying but didn’t have the words or courage to say what I needed to say.”

Part of the problem was that they couldn’t even discuss what had happened. “It took time before we could even talk about it without me crying or her crying or both of us crying. That’s why they have support groups for families, because it’s not just you who goes through abuse – it’s your family. So you all need to come together and forgive and heal. You all have to be there for each other.” Now she says there is no way she could have come this far without her mother.

Has she managed to regain trust in men? “For a good year and a half I couldn’t even bear for somebody to stand near me or be hugged. Apart from hugging my kids and my family, anything else would make me feel traumatised. I was like, well, if I don’t touch anybody and don’t let anybody come near me, I’ll be OK. You can’t live like that. But the trust issue is always going to be there.” She says she can’t imagine being with somebody unless she has known them a long time – which she certainly never felt in the past. “It takes someone who is going to understand and be compassionate and take everything super-super-slow.”

Is she in a relationship now? She nods. “I’m with someone who’s very kind. Very, very kind. And more than anything we’re really good friends from way back.” Is that someone in Leeds? “I’m not telling you!” she screams, old-school. “It’s private! Please, everything else is out in the open. Jesus!” And she bursts out laughing.

She calls out mid-sentence. “Mother!” The formality surprises me. “Motherrrrr!” she shouts again. Does she always call her mother? “Yes! Mother, you’re eating chocolate. I thought you were going to eat healthy! My soup’s downstairs, Mother.” She ticks her off affectionately. Andrea comes into the camera’s view, waves and looks bashful about the Easter egg. And now we’re drowned out by barking dogs. “This big fluffy one is pregnant,” she says, pointing to Luna. She says she loves being back in Leeds, points to the window and tells me there are cows and sheep in the back garden.

She gives me a quick tour, pointing to a leopard-skin chest of drawers. “I’ve got my leopard-skin chest here, of course.” Perhaps you could pop out of it next time the Spice Girls tour? “Ha! I won’t fit in it. My boobs are too big to be able to fit in that. Hahahaha!”

It’s great to hear some of the batty, fun-loving Mel B of old. I ask if she has learned to like herself again. She thinks about it. “Yeah,” she says. “I genuinely do. It took me a long time to say that, but I think I’m really engaging, and I’m really nosy, which makes for a good listener. Yeah, I think I’m great.”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or by emailing jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.