Melanie “Mel C” Chisholm – aka Sporty Spice – revealed she was sexually assaulted the night before her first Spice Girls gig.
The singer claims in her new autobiography, “Who I Am: My Story,” that the assault took place at a hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1997 when she was 23 years old.
“It happened to me on the night before the first ever Spice Girls live performance,” Chisholm, now 48, writes in her memoir, per the Daily Mail.
“We were in Istanbul, we did two shows over there, and we’d never done a full-length concert before, so obviously we’d rehearsed for weeks ahead, costume fittings, make-up here,” she continues.
“Everything was leading towards the pinnacle of everything I’d ever wanted to do and ever wanted to be.”
Chisholm says the incident occurred after she decided to treat herself to a massage in the hotel on the eve of their first show.
“I was in an environment where you take your clothes off with this professional person,” she writes. “It affected me.”
The “Wannabe” singer then remembers getting up and walking out of the massage, trying to block out what just happened.
Chrisholm claims she went years without speaking about it, and instead “buried” the memory of what allegedly happened.
“What happened to me I kind of buried immediately because there were other things to focus on. I didn’t want to make a fuss, but also I didn’t have time to deal with it,” she recalls in her memoir.
“Because I didn’t deal with it at the time, I realize that I allowed that to be buried for years and years and years.”
However, the traumatic incident all came back to her in a dream, she says, when she started writing her book.
“I kind of woke up and it was in my mind and it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I haven’t even thought about having that in the book.’ Then of course I had to think, ‘Do I want to reveal this?’” she explains. “I just thought, ‘I think it’s really important for me to say it and to finally deal with it and process it’ – and for other people.”
She continues, “I suppose in a version of sexual assault it’s a mild version but I felt violated. I felt very vulnerable. I felt embarrassed, and then I felt unsure. ‘Have I got this right, what’s going on?’”
Previously, Chisholm has been vocal with fans about her struggles with depression during the peak of her career.
She admitted that the “cruel and heartless” nature of the music industry caused her to be “desperately unhappy” at times.
“The lows of being famous were devastatingly hard. I was vulnerable, and the tabloids were cruel and heartless. It pushed me to the point of illness,” she confessed in a 2020 essay for UK’s “The Guardian.”
“Who I Am: My Story” hits bookshelves on Thursday.
