Mel B Details Suicide Attempt During Troubled Marriage in New Book

Mel B (Credit: Deposit Photos)

Melanie “Mel B” Brown has revealed she tried to take her life during her stormy marriage to then-husband Stephen Belafonte.

The Spice Girls performer and America’s Got Talent judge, popularly known as Mel B, details the 2014 suicide attempt in her upcoming memoir, Brutally Honest.

“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 writes in an excerpt exclusively published Saturday by U.K. paper The Sun.

The now 43-year-old singer says her marriage was in tatters and she wanted out.

“I felt ugly and detested by the very man who once promised to love and protect me, my husband and manager Stephen,” she writes. “A man who after ten years of marriage now had a library of sex tapes that could — as we both well knew — ruin my career and destroy my family.”

While working on British competition series The X Factor, she decided to end her life.

“It’s Thursday night. 11 December 2014. I’ve come back from dinner with my husband Stephen. Tomorrow I’m going to The X Factor. It will be the red-carpet launch for the final weekend. 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 writes.

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Stephen Belafonte and Mel B (Credit: Deposit Photos)
Stephen and Melanie in happier times (Credit: Deposit Photos)

She says she took nearly 200 aspirin pills.

“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 blacked out and woke up with bruises all over her body. But the mother-of-three says she soon realized she’d made mistake, and told herself to snap out of it.

“As soon as I’d swallowed that last pill, I knew I didn’t want to go anywhere,” she writes. “‘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.”

She was taken to the hospital, where doctors told her there was serious damage to her liver and kidneys. The medical staff said she needed to rest. But against their advice, she returned to work the next day for the finale of The X Factor.

“I had bruises round my eyes, my cheek was swollen, and I had massive dark welts on my arms from the constant stabbing at my weak, narrow veins with the IV drips,” she writes, but says she wanted the bruises to be seen.

Brown and Belafonte divorced after ten years of marriage in 2017.

Brutally Honest will be released on Nov. 27. You can read  the full excerpt here.