Melanie “Mel B” Brown is looking back on some dark times.
The Spice Girls performer shared some new details on her 2014 suicide attempt in her new book, Brutally Honest, where she admits she “took nearly 200 aspirin pills” trying to escape her marriage to Stephen Belafonte.
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Brown wrote in the memoir that the suicide attempt happened on Dec. 11, 2014, while she was in the middle of filming the live shows for The X Factor in the U.K, Us Weekly first reported.
The now America’s Got Talent host recalled getting home from dinner with her husband the night before she was scheduled to appear at the red carpet launch for the final weekend of the British reality competition series.
“I’ll be wearing a beautiful dress, my hair and make-up will be perfect. But if you want the absolute truth, I don’t care about any of it. My life is a mess and I want out,” she wrote in an excerpt published in The Sun.
Sitting in the bathroom of her rented London home, Brown held an open bottle of aspirin and took one pill after the other.
“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?’” she wrote. “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,” she added, claiming that after 10 years of marriage he was threatening to destroy her career and family with a library of sex tapes.
She said that as she swallowed more and more pills, Brown wrote “frantic, disjointed notes” to her eldest daughter, Phoenix.
When she arrived at the 200th pill, Brown stopped herself.
“I knew I didn’t want to go anywhere… Suicide was not the answer. I had to make my life count. I had to get to a hospital. I had to get those pills out of my stomach before anything happened.”
The singer relived having to push against the bathroom door, which was jammed as she was trying to get out, resulting in bruises on her face and shoulder, which some fans noticed when she appeared on The X Factor.
“I can still remember the fear, panic and absolute confusion in my head. Then everything started to go black and I collapsed to my knees. I could feel the life in me starting to drain away,” she wrote.
Brown woke up at the hospital surrounded by doctors and nurses, with Phoenix asking her why she had done it.
“It was the saddest moment of my life,” Brown admitted. “Looking at my daughter — distraught, devastated, angry — was the moment I knew the fight back had to start.”
She was in intensive care when she woke up and suffered serious damage to her liver and kidneys but chose to appear on The X Factor anyways. During the episode, she was seen wearing a sleeveless dress.
“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,” she wrote. “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.”
Making that statement, she said, made her feel like “Wonder Woman.”
“I’ve sent my message to Stephen,” Brown added. “There’s no going back. I’m going to leave him, get a divorce. I’m going to be free.”
The couple separated in December 2016 and she filed for divorce in March 2017, accusing her husband of 10 years of “emotional and physical abuse. Their divorce was finalized in December, though their custody battle for daughter Phoenix continues to make headlines.
