Mel B on domestic abuse, trauma and recovery: ‘In my mind there was no way out’

elanie Brown is in her tracksuit talking to me from her Leeds home. Her mother has popped round and is chomping away on an Easter egg she has just found, despite the fact that Brown has made her some “amazing” spicy curry soup for lunch. Her oldest daughter, Phoenix, is going to extreme measures to get her attention. Meanwhile, tiny yorkshire terrier Cookie has jumped into Brown’s arms, as her French bulldogs Yoshi and Yoda and golden doodle Luna wander around making mischief. It’s a picture of contented domestic chaos.

But it wasn’t always like this. Four years ago Brown, better known as Mel B or Scary Spice, was living in Los Angeles, married to the American film producer Stephen Belafonte and, she says, terrified for her life. In her 2018 memoir Brutally Honest, she documented the horror of her day-to-day existence – alleging physical, sexual, verbal and financial abuse.

Over the previous decade her life had become an elaborate lie as she announced to the world she had never been happier than with Belafonte. And yet she was seen with bruises on her face and arms, and stories emerged about how the famously extroverted Brown had become withdrawn and remote.

I experienced the deceit first-hand. The first time I interviewed her, in 2014, she presented her life as one long hedonistic, sex-tastic idyll. When I talked to her in 2018 she apologised and admitted it had been a pack of lies – the only way she knew to hide her shame and, more importantly, to survive. “It was my duty to lie because in my mind there was no way out,” she says today. “You’re living in a nightmare, and then tell the outside world that everything is fine because you’re so embarrassed, and riddled with guilt, and worried that nobody’s going to believe you.” There were times, Brown says, she thought Belafonte would kill her, and other times when she felt suicidal.

Back in 2018 she was still loud, funny and filthy, but there was also something fragile about her. She had only recently come out of the relationship, and the trauma was just beginning to hit her. Today she seems stronger.

For the past three years she has had little time for music or television, apart from a Spice Girls reunion tour and an appearance in the talent show The Masked Singer. When she has not been focusing on rebuilding herself and her relationship with her family, she has been campaigning against domestic violence. Brown works with the charity Women’s Aid, telling her story about domestic abuse and encouraging others to tell theirs. She has just made a devastating four-minute film about domestic abuse, Love Should Not Hurt. It is wordless and accompanied by a gorgeous piano soundtrack composed by Fabio D’Andrea, who also directed the film. The juxtaposition of gently entrancing music and chilling imagery works brilliantly, as we see a successful, wealthy woman kicked, punched and spat on by her partner. At the same time the couple present an image of enraptured bliss to friends. The film ends with a sobering statistic from the World Health Organization: one in three women globally are subjected to physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, or sexual violence from a non-partner.