PROFILE
Record-breaking pop star, feminist icon, fierce campaigner – Mel B is still showing us the true meaning of girl power. But, as she tells Georgia Green, finding her self-worth has been a complicated journey
When Melanie Brown MBE joins our video call, refreshingly bare-faced, with her trademark curls piled on top of her head, I’m slightly bemused by the scene in front of me. She is surrounded by Union Jack paraphernalia: even the armchair she’s perched on bears the distinctive red, white and blue design. Have I got the wrong Spice Girl? Talking to me from the converted loft space of her Yorkshire abode, a stone’s throw from the childhood home she shared with her mother, Andrea, father, Martin, and younger sister, Danielle, Brown explains that she stole all the Union Jack stuff from fellow Spice Girl Geri Horner’s dressing room on the 2019 Spice World reunion tour. ‘I just love being on tour with those girls. It’s like you’re in a floating time-machine bubble,’ she smiles. ‘My dressing room was all leopard print, Emma [Bunton]’s all pink and fluffy, and Geri’s Union Jack.’
The tour marked the band’s first group foray (minus Victoria Beckham) since the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, with around 700,000 fans in attendance across 13 sold-out dates. ‘It was electrifying,’ Brown reflects. ‘I got to really push the boundaries of my fitness and my mental health. It reminded me how I was before anything really bad started happening. But it was also the first time I’d looked the girls in the face and said, “I’m sorry I shut the door on you when all that stuff was happening.”’
By ‘all that stuff’, Brown is referring to the years of physical and emotional abuse she says she endured during her 10-year marriage to film producer Stephen Belafonte, whom she divorced in 2017. The pair wed in a private ceremony in Las Vegas in 2007 after a whirlwind two-month courtship and Brown has described what followed as like ‘living in a nightmare’. In November 2018, almost a year after her divorce was finalised, Brown told her story in her memoir, Brutally Honest, and now, six years on, she’s bringing it up to date in an expanded edition.
‘A lot has happened on my journey since bringing the book out,’ Brown reflects. ‘I thought I owed it to anybody who’s dared to pick up the book, dared to read it, dared to leave their abuser – and I know there have been hundreds, because I get a lot of emails. I wanted to acknowledge how far I’ve come and show that it is possible to move on after abuse, but it’s not easy. You don’t just wake up one da
