cupure logo
trumphomerevealspolicewomanfamilyworldholidaystarmillion

Tulisa: 'If I Was A Nepo Baby, I'd Have Been The Nation's Sweetheart, Instead I Was The Chav From Camden'

Tulisa: 'If I Was A Nepo Baby, I'd Have Been The Nation's Sweetheart, Instead I Was The Chav From Camden'
Tulisa is laying it all on the table in her new memoir JudgementIt was 2012, and Tulisa Contostavlos had every reason to believe that things for her were looking up. She had the number one single in the UK, was putting together her debut album and was getting ready to return for a second season judging on the most popular TV show in the country.Alright, she’d taken a few knocks in the press and online – we’re talking about the 2010s after all, when the tabloids reigned supreme and social media was in its infancy, with people still finding it a novelty to be able to tweet whatever they wanted about previously-untouchable celebrities – but for all she may have had her haters, she also had a loyal base of supporters and famous friends.Two years later, Tulisa found herself in a very different situation, speaking to reporters outside of Southwark Crown Court, at the end of a legal case she said had “ruined” her life, after the man who first brought about the charges, The Sun journalist Mazher Mahmood, was found to have lied during the proceedings (he was later found guilty of perjury).It was an arduous ordeal for the chart-topping singer, who had suffered damage to her reputation, finances and mental health, and lost friends, work opportunities and, of course, money throughout the traumatic experience. While all of that went on, she was still being hounded by the press, and picked apart on social media over everything from her background to her appearance. At her lowest point, she tried twice to take her own life.Understandably, this is a period in Tulisa’s life she’s chosen to not revisit often. That is, until she put together her new book Judgement, exploring the case in candid detail like never before, based on diary entries she recorded at the time, as well as diving deeper into the classism and misogyny that she was faced throughout her time in the spotlight.Tulisa outside Southwark Crown Court in July 2014, after the collapse of her trialTulisa says it’s “straight anxiety” that stopped her telling her story before this point. In fact, conversations first began about a book deal right after the court case concluded, and have picked up again at numerous points over the last decade, only for her to not pursue them any further.“I was not ready for the anxiety that would come with my personal life being out there,” she tells HuffPost UK. “I didn’t want all the headlines that were going to come with it. There’s so much information in the book, and personal, personal stuff.”Eventually, though, she realised that she couldn’t let what she describes as “this great fucking story” go untold. “What have you gone through all of that for if there’s no purpose off the back of it?” she reasoned. “Like, you can’t die without releasing that book.”Most people’s introduction to Tulisa was as a member of N-Dubz, the hip-hop trio she formed as a teenager alongside her cousin Dappy and fellow performer Fazer. By the time N-Dubz reached number one in 2009, they’d already been hard at work on the band for the better part of a decade. A string of hits came afterwards, including multiple top 10s and collaborations with the likes of Tinchy Stryder, Mr Hudson and Skepta.Still, for all of N-Dubz’s chart success, their growing fanbase and all the fun they were having together as a group, Tulisa recalls that they still struggled to be taken seriously by the media during this period, for reasons she now puts down to “classism and culture clash”.“The press just hated us,” she recalls. “They treated us like a joke. Three chavs from Camden, up to trouble again, we were just that… the naughty three kids.“We were making platinum albums at the time, but the ‘adults’ that were the journalists at the time were just snubbing their noses up.”Dappy, Tulisa and Fazer of N-Dubz performing together in 2009As a young woman in the music industry (for much of N-Dubz’s early success, she was still in her late teens), Tulisa says most of the misogyny she encountered during that time was “in the meetings”.“So like, in the industry itself,” she clarifies. “Behind the scenes, where you come across a lot of wankers. You know, older men, whether it’s in the label or wherever.“Because I always had two guys either side of me, people just wouldn’t mess with me like that. In that sense, it might have protected me. But to be fair, even if they did, I was very outspoken.”“Where it became really relevant to me was when I went on X Factor,” she continues. “Then, I started noticing… you get to that side of the industry, you start meeting a lot of bigwigs, and you’re like, ‘ah, OK, I see what’s going on here’. The higher up in the system you go, the bigger the misogyny gets.”N-Dubz had brought Tulisa a huge amount of success, especially for someone so young, but when she was cast as a judge on The X Factor – then at the height of its cultural peak – taking over a spot on the panel previously occupied by national treasure Cheryl, her profile exploded even further.“Part of me had this really older head on my shoulders, I thought I knew everything and I was wise for my age,” she says of accepting the role at just 22 years old (something she describes as “fucking nuts” in hindsight). “And then, another side of me kind of felt like a big kid that had just been led through the back door. I’d be sat on the panel like, ‘how did I get here?’.”“You talk to 22-year-olds now, and you’re like, ‘imagine you doing that’. I just want to wrap them up in cotton wool,” she notes.Tulisa strikes her signature pose during an X Factor live show in 2011Referring to herself in her X Factor days, Tulisa admits: “I don’t know who that is. I give her hugs and love, you know, and I’m proud of her for everything she’s got through and everything she achieved. But I’m like… a completely different human.”When Tulisa was confirmed to be joining The X Factor in 2011, she remembers a mixed reception. As she puts it: “There were a lot of people that were very wound up by the fact of where I came from, that I didn’t deserve to be there. There was a lot of hate – but there was also a lot of positivity!”It wasn’t long, though, before she felt the media’s constant attacks on her had begun to taint the public’s perception.She laments: “It was just one after another after another after another. Building on this persona and this bullshit fucking character, and it just got worse and worse.“The amount of negative stories that were bullshit, made up shit that I can remember being written at the time – whether it was, I’d ‘trashed my hotel room’, because I’d accidentally knocked over a curtain, or, you know, ‘Tulisa’s big Stafford terror attacks Gary Barlow’s chihuahua’. Just constant things that made me out to be this real, extremely naughty, hard-faced bitch.”“And then,” she sighs. “By the time the tape came out, that was it. It was like hell.”Tulisa on the X Factor panel with fellow judges Louis Walsh, Kelly Rowland and Gary BarlowIn March 2012, just a few months after she became the winning mentor on her first season of The X Factor with her act, Little Mix, an intimate video of Tulisa and an ex-boyfriend began doing the rounds online. Tulisa later won an injunction against the clip being posted, as well as an apology from the ex in question, but her reputation had still taken an undeniable hit. Some had even accused her of being complicit in leaking the footage in an attempt to drum up publicity, which her legal team at the time said was both “particularly distressing” and “wholly untrue”.“I always experienced a lot of hate, even in school, so I was used to the feeling of being the underdog and the oddball,” she explains. “So, to me, it was just ‘same old, same old’.“But when it took that turn after the tape came out, I was like, ‘woah, this is heavy’. I wasn’t registering how wrong it was, I was just like, ‘I’m just unlucky, that’s just me’, rather than actually going, ‘you motherfuckers are the problem’.”Unfortunately for Tulisa, things would only get worse from there.The ins and outs of what came next are well-documented by this point, but in 2013, Tulisa was approached by what she believed to be a group of film producers hoping to turn her into a movie star. In fact, they were a group of journalists from The Sun On Sunday, led by Mazher Mahmood (dubbed the “Fake Sheikh” in the press due to his infamous undercover work).Over a series of weeks, the group led Tulisa to believe she was being eyed for a role in a Bollywood film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and flew her backwards and forwards to Las Vegas for supposed negotiations, all while encouraging her to act in certain ways and play up to specific character traits. They told her that, in lieu of an official audition, they wanted to see her acting the part in real life, before deciding whether to cast her or Keira Knightley.The whole thing, we now know, was a sting operation, culminating in one night when Tulisa says she was plied with alcohol over a six-hour period, and repeatedly asked by Mahmood if she could supply him with cocaine.Despite maintaining that she did not use the drug herself, she has claimed she frantically began playing up to the character she wanted to be cast in, ultimately providing them with the phone number of a friend, but never intended for them to actually provide drugs to anyone.What followed was a front page splash in The Sun On Sunday, headlined “Tulisa’s cocaine deal shame”, an arrest and eventually a charge of “being concerned in the supply of Class A drugs”.The case was dropped in July 2014, when a judge ruled that Mahmood had lied to the court. He was eventually imprisoned for 15 months for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.Tulisa is reflecting on the most "harrowing" parts of her life in the spotlight in her own words in her new memoir“I was 24. And it finished when I was 26,” she recalls. “And even then it didn’t finish because I was a key witness in his trial, and I was terrorised for a year running up to that. A lot of intimidation tactics, constantly being followed around, coming home to doors being left open, boxes in front of the door, crazy shit.“And look, here we are, 12 years later, still fucking talking about it. So it’s consumed my entire life.”Tulisa now believes that someone from within the entertainment industry paid Mahmood to set up the sting operation. “I had clearly ruffled some feathers of some bigwigs in the industry, and someone said, ‘get her gone’,” she claims. “When you talk about the misogyny of those ‘wankers’ [in the industry], that’s along the lines of what we’re getting at. It had to be someone who can afford it.”She suggests: “I think when I was brought into this industry, coming from where I came from, people expected me to be a lot more like, ‘what do you want me to do? Yeah I’ll do this. Thank you, I’m so happy to be here’. Whereas my attitude was always, ‘you fucking need me, go and get someone else to do your shit’. I wouldn’t play the game in a lot of ways.“Let’s say, there’s a dinner meeting,” she continues. “And there is a number of people there, and there are a lot of big businessmen, who are very powerful in the industry. And you’re sat there, not playing the game, while they’re rubbing up hands on legs and doing disgusting shit, expecting disgusting shit, expecting me to arse lick and be what they want me to be. And I’m there telling them to suck a dick.“Eventually, you do that to enough of these bigwigs, it becomes a problem.”In their view, Tulisa says, “I was lucky to be there, and I was very ungrateful”. “Because I wasn’t going to take one over a desk for the team,” she adds with an exasperated laugh.Throughout the case, Tulisa also had to grapple with both the press and social media making sport of her misfortune. On her first day in court, side-by-side pictures of the singer next to Nigella Lawson – who was going through legal trouble of her own around the same time – were widely shared in an attempt to compare Tulisa unfavourably to the TV chef.Tulisa arriving at Westminster Magistrates' Court in 2013 shortly after she was first charged“I remember that,” she says of the negative comparisons, which once again puts down to “classism”. “There are so many superstars that have been caught racking up lines, dropping bags of cocaine, white powder all over their nose,” she points out.“And I was the girl that had never done drugs, but gave someone a telephone number, after being pestered by them, for a three-million pound movie role, and I was the worst person in the world.”Had her background been different, Tulisa believes she “one hundred percent” would have been given an easier ride in the press.“[If I] had a family that would have brought me into [the industry], that knew people that knew people, of course, I would have been treated differently,” she insists. “I would have been the graceful, nation’s sweetheart. Instead I was the chav from Camden Town.”Had the same thing happened to her in today’s media landscape, Tulisa believes the media landscape has changed enough in the last decade, that were the same thing to happen today, certain aspects would play out rather differently.“The question everyone’s asking now is ‘but why did this happen to you?’. Who paid this money and why?’. All these questions,” she points out. “But back then, it was just ‘yeah, it’s great news, we’ll take it’. Gossip. No one cares why. They just wanted the opportunity to point the finger.“I think [today] people would ask a lot more questions. And I don’t know why at the time my lawyers told me to keep my mouth shut, because I would have fucking blown it up to Timbucktu and back. I wish I’d done that now, but I took the advice of my lawyers.“And you saw, even after I told my truth, there were still some people that were like, ’ehhh, we don’t care’.”Tulisa pictured in the This Morning studio earlier this monthThe same goes for her sex tape, which was circulated online five years before the Me Too movement drew attention to the abuse, harassment and misconduct faced by women the world over, and two years before a mass hack saw a number of celebrities’ nude photos and videos being shared online.“Now, there’s court cases, people are victims, it’s ‘poor this person’, ‘poor that person’,” she says. “But when I was going through it, it was just, ‘whore’.”But that’s not to say Tulisa believes the UK media is anywhere near perfect today.“There is a lot more awareness and sensitivity. But I think the situation that we’re in now is like… there’s a bit of a ‘pick and choose’ situation going on,” she observes.“We ‘pick and choose’ who we’re sensitive with, and other people get a lot of shit. So it’s better, but there’s still a long way to go. There’s all this talk of we need to ‘be kind’ and this and that, but then, we’re still doing all of that when the fancy takes us. Sometimes, when a mistake has been made [by a famous person], it’s not very forgiving. If you actually have done something, or you get caught in the midst of something, it’s like… no holds barred.”She continues: “It’s also very political, in terms of industry politics. It’s very much ‘who you know’.“There are a lot of nepo babies that have connections, they already came from money, they already had a lot of protection. And you see them – and I know things about people, and they’re completely untouchable. Because they have the support of that powerful side of the industry.“Then, the other people, that come from nothing, they come in, come from nowhere, and they just get ripped to shreds and fed to the wolves.”Still, as harsh as the media was towards her at the time of her trial, Tulisa had more pressing things on her mind during that period.“I was spending less time thinking, ‘why are they doing this to me’ and more thinking, ‘how am I going to survive this?’,” she says. “The hardest part, honestly, was probably the fear of financial disaster. Because it was like, ’alright, I’ve got this much money, but I’ve got this much to pay out, I’ve lost this much, and I’m never going to work again, so how am I going to survive? I’m going to end up fucking broke and homeless by the end of this’.”Because of her background, Tulisa says she had “always” been worried about losing the money she’d made through N-Dubz and X Factor, “so, my worst nightmare was happening”.“It was less, ‘why are the media being so horrible?’ and more just like, ‘oh my god, I’m in a fucking shitstorm how do I get out?’. It was just keeping my head above water.”Once the case was finally over, Tulisa was initially desperate to get back to work. Her attitude, she recalls, was “fuck you, you can’t keep a bad bitch down”.“I went out all guns blazing, but then once I actually started processing what had happened and how much my life had changed, that’s when the depression kicked in, and the anxiety,” she admits. “And then I went into the rollercoaster of that afterwards. Trauma will do that to you.”In the decade that followed, Tulisa mostly kept something of a low profile, and has been upfront about the issues she faced during those years, including a dependency on benzodiazepine that dominated her life for a number of years, and a period in which she began experiencing agoraphobia.Throughout it all, the idea remained of one day using her diaries to turn them into a book about her experiences, once the time was right.Finally, she reunited with N-Dubz in 2022, and two years later, was offered a spot on the line-up of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!.Tulisa in the I'm A Celebrity jungle last year“I had always looked at the jungle as something I’d love to do, but I would never do,” she claims. “I started thinking about it, and I was thinking about how terrified it made me feel instantly, just so consumed with fucking fear, like, ‘not a chance’.”Then, she says, she had a realisation: “This [fear] is all off the back of the trial. I would be able to do these things otherwise’. And I got this sense of, ‘don’t fucking let them win’.”And so, off Tulisa flew to Australia. She did pretty well in the jungle, lasting two weeks before she was eliminated, and credits the experience with helping her overcome certain anxieties around being in the public eye.But in the immediate aftermath of the experience, old issues around being in the spotlight began to resurface. Tulisa has made no secret of the fact that her days after leaving I’m A Celebrity proved to be difficult for her, and she wound up flying back to the UK before the end of the series.“When I came out I was like, ‘get me the fuck out of here now’. It was too much,” she says, pointing out she’d been in Australia for a month by the time she left the jungle, owing to the two weeks she was there before the beginning of the series.“I had been overcoming my agoraphobia for the past few years, even stepping out of the house [was hard]. I was just overwhelmed in a sense of, ‘I don’t want to be here’. I literally just needed to get the fuck home.”“I’m now just about my peace and protecting my mental health. You don’t need me here! Just to make an appearance on the end show and [wave]? It’s not [important], what is [important] is my sanity right now, just let me go home. And I did!”“I have been absolutely dragged through the fucking mill,” she remarks. “Of course, I’m someone that [values peace]. I’m like an 80-year-old woman trapped in a 37-year-old’s body, the life experience that I’ve had.”Did she regret saying yes to I’m A Celebrity?“I did, when I first came out,” she admits. “I was like, ‘woah, too much’. But once I’d processed… now, when I look back at it, I’m glad I did it.”Tulisa with the rest of the cast of I'm A Celebrity 2024All of that leads us up to today, and the book Tulisa is so proud to finally be releasing.Tulisa explains that she chose to put the book out in “story form” to put the reader “right in the moment”, and also heavily incorporates details of a tumultuous relationship the star found herself in at the height of the court case.“It ended up being like Sex And The City on a drugs charge,” she jokes. “I’m not telling people to go out and buy a boring autobiography. You’re getting a shit load of juice, it’s a great fucking read.”For Tulisa, the writing process was both healing and triggering. The unique way she’s presented her story allowed her to create some distance between herself and her trauma.“Writing it was enjoyable, because [the story is] juicy. Because I’m having to use some creativity going into it, rather than just like, ‘this is my trauma that happened today’, you’re putting it in a form that is exciting to read. And that was a good distraction,” she explains. “And then, when I’d read it back, I’d be like, ‘this is great’. It became some excitement out of a very terrible situation.”That said, she also admits that having to repeatedly go over the events in the editing process could be a “draining” experience.“It’s a story you’ve read over 100 times, having to do it again, and again, about this harrowing time in your life,” she recalls. “That was the soul-sucking part.“But by the time I’d get to the end of it, I’d always be left with this feeling of hope. Like, ‘wow you did that, and you got through that fucking year’. And then I found, because it was so long ago, I could detach from myself, like, I’m a character in the book.”Tulisa acknowledges that the project will inevitably generate headlines and press attention, which could reopen old wounds, although after her I’m A Celebrity experience, it felt like “now or never” to finally put her version of the events that have dominated so much of her life out there.“There are going to be people that talk shit, there are going to be haters and all the rest,” she concedes. “But there are also going to be thousands of people that read it and go, ‘fuck me, if Tulisa can get through 2013, I can get through life’.“And that’s worth it, I’ll take the shit for that.”Judgement: Love, Trials And Tribulations by Tulisa is available now from Blink Publishing.View this post on InstagramA post shared by Tulisa Contostavlos (@tulisacontostavlos)MORE INTERVIEWS:Rosie O’Donnell: ‘I Look At America, And I Feel Overwhelmingly Depressed’'What The F**k Has Happened Here?': Carol Vorderman Is Still Asking The Big QuestionsAlexandra Burke: 'If I Can Make One Person Smile, That's My Job Done'

Comments

Breaking news