Girl power! Spice Girls singer Melanie Brown, a.k.a. Scary Spice Mel B, has had a couple of high-profile romances with men — most notably, actor Eddie Murphy — but it’s her relationship with a woman that’s making headlines now. As she revealed in a recent interview with the UK’s Guardian newspaper, she once had a long-term relationship with a mother whose children attended school with her eldest daughter, Phoenix.
“Well, I did have a four-year relationship with a woman,” Brown told The Guardian, which identified her girlfriend as Crista Parker. “But I’ve been very happily married for seven years to a penis. Ha ha! An amazing guy.” (The 39-year-old Brit tied the knot with movie producer Stephen Belafonte in 2007.)
“I’ve definitely not been shy or been one to hold back,” she added of her once-tumultuous love life. “If I wanted to try something, I did. I had a girlfriend. So what?”
These days, of course, she’s a one-man woman. “Let me put it this way, we’re just very sexually compatible in every way,” she teased of her husband, with whom she has a 3-year-old daughter, Madison Brown Belafonte. (Madison is her third child; she’s also mom to Phoenix, 15, with ex-husband Jimmy Gulzar, and Angel, 7, with Murphy.) “We think very much alike, and we get turned on by the same things,” she added.
Their marriage is “tight and solid” — but Brown still notices and appreciates beauty in other women. “I will be the first one to compliment a woman, to say to my husband, ‘Oh my God, look at her legs’; or ‘Doesn’t she look stunning?'” she told The Guardian. “I do think women are gorgeous. Crazy but gorgeous.”
Speaking of gorgeous women, the America’s Got Talent judge also opened up to the paper about her time as a member of the Spice Girls. “I found my group of people that I actually fit in, who don’t judge or go, ‘What are you doing that for?'” she said of the ’90s girl band. “We complemented each other. I found my people, finally.”
They didn’t always get along, of course, but Brown recalls even their fights with some fondness. “Me and Mel C had a few punch-ups,” she admitted, noting there might have been a “split lip” or two along the way. “Me and Melanie would irritate each other. It would always start off with a shove, not a punch.”
“Mel C’s pretty hard,” she told the paper of Sporty Spice Melanie Chisholm. “And if she let rip…but then two seconds later we’d be rolling around laughing, going, ‘Oh, you silly bugger.'”
