Mel B hopes her “inner person” wasn’t killed off by her “abusive” marriage.
The Spice Girls singer, 47, said she is facing “huge fears” about her past with her former husband Stephen Belafonte as she faces challenges in Fox’s “Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test” show.
Mel said about joining the programme in the season premiere of the series on Wednesday: “I ended up being in a very horrible, abusive 10-year relationship. I felt worthless, you feel helpless. I’m facing huge fears.
“I’m just going to bring out that inner person that I hope isn’t dead and gone.”
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Belafonte, 47, has always strongly denied Mel’s claims he was emotionally and physically abusive during their marriage, which lasted from 2007 to 2017.
Mel last year went into more detail about her account of the relationship, saying she lived with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder five years after it ended.
She told “The Sun”: “Nearly five years on I still wake up in the early hours with terrifying fragments of sounds and images flitting into my brain, things I’ve tried to block float to the surface – things that can still make me feel drenched in shame, sweat and fear.”
Mel also told how she turned to drink and drugs to dull her “pain” while in the marriage.
She and Belafonte had daughter Madison Brown Belafonte, 11, and Mel has two children from previous relationships – Phoenix Chi Gulzar, 23, and Angel Iris Murphy Brown, 15, who she co-parents with Eddie Murphy.
The singer also told last year at an event hosted by “The Sun” and Women’s Aid at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham how she was left feeling “completely powerless” by her relationship with Belafonte.
Mel, appointed MBE in 2022 for her work with vulnerable women, and who became a patron for Women's Aid in 2018, said: “I am not here because I am Mel B, Scary Spice from the Spice Girls.
“I am here because I am Melanie Brown MBE... and you think, ‘well, Spice Girls are all about Girl Power’, but let me tell you, when these abusers get their hooks into you, there is no way out, really, (or) so you think... I was completely isolated from my friends and family.
“And it didn't happen overnight. It happened bit by bit by bit. They chip away at you.”