The Spice Girl reveals she tried to take her life by taking about 200 aspirin pills in her new book, 'Brutally Honest.'
Mel B is opening up like never before.
In her new memoir, Brutally Honest, the Spice Girl describes her 2014 suicide attempt, where she took about 200 aspirin pills to escape her tumultuous relationship from her then-husband Stephen Belafonte.
In an excerpt published in The Sun on Saturday, Mel begins to describe how she came home from having a night out with Belafonte and felt like her life was "a mess and I want out."
"Here I am, 39 years of age, staring in a mirror in the en-suite bathroom of my rented house in Kensington, London, holding an open bottle of aspirin from the stash I’ve stockpiled over the years, putting one pill after another into my mouth," she detailed. "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?' 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 continued by sharing how she "wrote frantic, disjointed notes" for her eldest daughter, Phoenix, but kept taking more pills.
"One hundred and 20. 'Are you sure?' 150. 'Are you sure?'" she asked herself. "Two hundred. 'Now what’s going to happen, Melanie? STOP!'...As soon as I’d swallowed that last pill, I knew I didn’t want to go anywhere. 'Melanie! What the f**k are you doing? Get a grip!'"
"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," Mel told herself. "My head was spinning. All I thought was that I needed to get out of the room but for some reason the door was jammed."
Explaining that she couldn't remember what happened next, she does recall throwing herself at the door. "I can’t remember the pain but 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. "And then nothing, silence. I lay semi-conscious on the bathroom floor and, with tears streaming down my face, drifting in and out of consciousness, waited to die."
She was then taken to the hospital, called Simon Cowell, lost consciousness and when she later woke up was surrounded by doctors and nurses, as well as her kids who were angry and distressed. "Looking at my daughter — distraught, devastated, angry — was the moment I knew the fightback had to start," she remembered.
While Mel wanted to get back to work on The X Factor, those close to her insisted she shouldn't. But Mel made it back in time for the show, wearing a sleeveless dress that showed off her injuries.
“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.”
“I’ve sent my message to Stephen,” she added. “There’s no going back. I’m going to leave him, get a divorce. I’m going to be free.”
Mel B married Belafonte in June 2007 and filed for divorce in March 2017. Prior to her divorce from Belafonte getting finalized at the end of 2017, Mel B had filed a temporary restraining order against him alleging both physical and sexual abuse, which she claims to have begun soon after they were married in 2007. Belafonte denied the allegations.
Brutally Honest -- and the audiobook, exclusively on Audible -- releases on Nov. 27.
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