Melanie C – the former Spice Girl born Melanie Chisholm and nicknamed Sporty Spice – has alleged that she was sexually assaulted by a masseur the night before the Spice Girls’ debut performance. Appearing on the How To Fail podcast to promote her new memoir Who I Am, Chisholm discussed the incident, which she says took place at a hotel in Istanbul. She told host Elizabeth Day that the experience made her feel “vulnerable” and “violated”.
“What happened to me, I kind of buried immediately, because there was other things to focus on,” she said, telling Day that the weeks of rehearsals and preparation the band had been doing made her want to focus on performing, rather than the assault. “Everything was leading towards the pinnacle of everything I’d ever wanted to do.”
“I didn’t want to make a fuss, but also I didn’t have time to deal with it,” she said. Chisholm described the assault as “mild” on a spectrum of sexual assault, and told Day that, although she didn’t initially intend to mention the assault in her memoir, she decided to write about it after she recalled it in a dream. “I think it’s really important to me to say it and to finally deal with it and process it.”
“Terrible things happen all the time, and this situation wasn’t as bad as it could have been,” Chisholm told Day, noting that being in “an environment where you take your clothes off with this professional person” added to her later confusion around the event. “I felt very vulnerable, I felt embarrassed.”
In the years since the Spice Girls disbanded, Chisholm has been open about the struggles she faced when she was part of the group. Speaking to the Guardian in 2020, she said that she was “struggling with an eating disorder and suffering from depression” at the height of her fame. Last year, she filed a claim against Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, alleging that she was a victim of phone-hacking.
In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
