Prince’s ex-wife Mayte Garcia is blasting Sinead O’Connor for her recently surfaced accusations against the pop music icon that he was violent toward women and that he abused hard drugs.
Garcia, who was married to Prince from 1996 to 2000, told TMZ that Prince was never violent with her — and that she never saw him be violent with anyone. She also told the news outlet that he didn’t partake in hard drugs while they were married, and that she saw him drunk only once.
Videos by PopCulture.com
Garcia’s skepticism comes days after Carver County Sheriff’s Office made public audio from an interview between O’Connor and police that took place less than two week’s after Prince’s April 2016 death. In the interview, which was part of an investigation into his death that was recently made public, O’Connor claimed Prince was a violent person.
“He had been extremely violent to a number of women in his life, including myself, and several women were put in the hospital while Prince was under the effects of these medications,” O’Connor said.
The Irish singer, whose biggest hit “Nothing Compares 2 U” was written by Prince, also claimed Prince did “hard drugs commonly” and claimed that he had a drug problem throughout his entire life.
“I’ve seen him in very frightening conditions after using drugs,” O’Connor said. “Now, I cannot say that I ever saw him use the drugs. I never saw him actually take them. He would retire to another room to take whatever the drugs were. When he would come out of the room, he would be very violent, very aggressive. His eyeballs would disappear, literally, from his eyes. They vanished.”
Garcia also denied O’Connor’s claims that Prince took part in “devil worship,” calling that assertion “ridiculously wrong.”
“I strongly deny that in his honor,” Garcia told TMZ.
Prince died from an accidental fentanyl overdose at 57 years old. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin. After a two-year investigation into his death, Carver County Attorney Mark Metz announced last week that no criminal charges will be filed in the musician’s death.
One Minneapolis doctor who was accused of illegally prescribing an opioid painkiller for Prince a week before he died agreed to pay $30,000 last week in a settlement of a federal civil violation.
While federal prosecutors said Dr. Michael Todd Schulenberg is not currently a target of any criminal investigation, the $30,000 settlement is a result of a violation of the Controlled Substances Act for writing a prescription in the name someone else on April 14, 2016.
The settlement does not name Prince or make any references to the Prince investigation. However, previously-released search warrants say Schulenberg told authorities he prescribed oxycodone to Prince on April 14 and put it under the name of Prince’s bodyguard and friend, Kirk Johnson, “for Prince’s privacy.”
