Melanie ‘Mel B’ Brown is opening up about the love of her life.
The Spice Girl sat down with hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain to discuss her new biography, Brutally Honest, where she candidly shared new details about her suicide attempt and past relationships – one of which was her notorious 2006 relationship with actor Eddie Murphy.
“He always will be,” Mel B said when asked about the “great love” of her life. “I mean, I’ve never really spoken about it before, so this book, I wanted to address it because a lot of people have a misconstrued thing of how everything actually did happen. And at the end of the day we have a beautiful daughter together, Angel, who is 11 years old, and she’s actually staying with him right now whilst I’m here working.”
While the America’s Got Talent host and Beverly Hills Cop actor – who dated for nine months in 2006 – may have been living a fairytale from the start, “it was like a love story that didn’t have a perfect ending,” Mel admitted, revealing that she was the one who decided to call it quits on the relationship.
“Well, I went for a dinner party at his house. It was very intense, that attraction, and I left actually because it was a bit too much,” Mel said. “But he’s such a lovely person, he’s all about family and he’s very respectful and very old school and we courted for quite some time before anybody knew.”
But when asked if she had any hopes of reigniting their romance in the future, Mel B respectfully chose to take the high road on commenting because he’s currently in a “lovely, committed relationship” with fiancée Paige Butcher.
“His lady’s got her second baby that she’s expecting in like a few weeks,” she said about Butcher, who’s pregnant with their second child together – and Murphy’s tenth. “So, I’m not gonna say anything else about that.”
Opening her heart to find new love, Mel B put her relationship with Murphy in the past and moved onto now-ex-husband Stephen Belafonte. Just months shy of their 10-year wedding anniversary, she filed for divorce from Belafonte, revealing the domestic abuse allegations she had shot down for years were, in fact, true.
“I had an unfortunate 10-year marriage, where I was in a very coercive, very abusive relationship, and it’s something that we don’t usually talk about – it’s seen as being taboo,” she shared. “So, I wanted to address all these different situations that I’ve been in, due to living such a life for 10 years. And, I wanted to own it and take back my power.”
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But the interview turned fiery when Reid told Mel B she “had to read the right to reply” to a statement from Belafonte reading: “Mr. Belafonte’s told us that there is new litigation planned. He will be answering the allegations against him in full, which he denies.”
“Oh no, I don’t want to hear that,” she commented, before adding “You shouldn’t do the right to reply. You shouldn’t have a platform for him to reply.”
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“Well, when he replies, you can reply again,” Morgan suggested with Mel B firing back, “No, why would I? Why would I get into a spat like that? It is what it is.”
Though Mel B reveals in her memoir that Belafonte deliberately targeted her while she was going through a vulnerable point in her life, she says it was her late father, Martin Brown, who gave her the strength to end her toxic marriage once and for all.
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“Despite all of that, I was still his daughter, the little girl he had adored more than life itself,” she recalled in an excerpt from her new autobiography, which was released exclusively to The Sun in November. “He might hate me, but I always knew that his love burned away underneath. In the end, it was my dad who gave me the strength to leave Stephen.”
Mel B made sure to leave no blank pages, adding that penning Brutally Honest was a very purifying process.
“I probably am still healing and learning from that whole, entire experience,” she said. “And, for me, being able to write a book and speak very honestly about what happened to me is very cathartic and very therapeutic and that’s a chapter of my life that’s now been put to rest in so many ways.”