“I was living a life of death. I didn’t exist,” Tina Turner said of the violence and abuse she suffered in her first marriage. “But I survived it. And when I walked out, I walked. And I didn’t look back.”
Turner’s bravery and willingness to speak up about the domestic abuse she experienced have prompted a deluge of praise and thanks since her death on Wednesday, as campaigners and fellow survivors hailed her as an inspiration.
Turner, who died aged 83 at her home in Switzerland after a long illness, became one of the first high-profile stars to speak openly about domestic and financial abuse when she put the record straight about her two-decade relationship with the singer-songwriter Ike Turner.
Melanie Brown, the former Spice Girl who detailed her own experience as a survivor of domestic abuse in the 2018 book Brutally Honest, said the singer had given her courage to speak out.
“She was the only person that I could think of in the whole entire world that had spoken about domestic violence so eloquently,” she said.
The Women’s Aid champion said she had been to watch Tina - The Tina Turner Musical at the Aldwych Theatre in London on Tuesday, and was moved to tears seeing attendees donating to the charity via the performance.
“She gave me, and lot of other survivors, hope that life can carry on and through the scars and the bruising and the PTSD and the flashbacks, you can live your life day by day and know that you can get better,” she said.
When Turner decided to speak to the journalist Carl Arrington for People magazine in 1981, she had spent years in the musical wilderness; singing in Las Vegas while struggling to convince record labels that she could make it as a solo artist after leaving Ike in 1976.
She told the publication that Ike had subjected her to years of trauma, forcing her to watch a sex show in a brothel on their wedding night, beating her with a shoe stretcher while she was pregnant, and throwing scalding coffee at her.
The pair married in 1962, and she told People that she finally left Ike while the pair were on tour in Dallas in 1976, fleeing with just “36 cents in her pocket and a Mobil credit card”.
“I felt proud,” she told the magazine about the moment she left. “I felt strong. I felt like Martin Luther King.”
Turner wrote about the trauma of her marriage in the first of her three memoirs, I: Tina, and it was explored again in the 1993 biographical film What’s Love Got to Do With It, and in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.
The musical paired up with Refuge in 2021 to mark the 50th anniversary of the the domestic abuse charity opening the world’s first refuge; a gala performance in 2023 supported the work of Women’s Aid, before the charity’s 50th anniversary.
Farah Nazeer, the chief executive at Women’s Aid, said Turner “showed that survivors of abuse can be the most incredible, strong women, and can rebuild their lives and live their dreams”. She added: “You cannot underestimate the effect that women in the public eye like Tina have on our understanding of domestic abuse.”
Refuge’s chief executive, Ruth Davison, said Turner’s story was one of resilience and feminist empowerment. “Tina proved that there is life after domestic abuse, she epitomised what it is to rise from the ashes and be a survivor,” she said.
The singer paid a price for speaking about the trauma she had experienced. The film-maker TJ Martin, the co-director of the 2021 HBO documentary Tina, said he and Dan Lindsay had used previous footage of her talking about the abuse, knowing it still gave her nightmares. “We were very aware that that is something that she is still dealing with,” he said at the time.
But over a career that spanned more than half a century, during which she sold more than 100m records, won 12 Grammys and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, Turner managed to find peace.
In her third memoir, published in 2020, Happiness Becomes You: A Guide to Changing Your Life for Good, Turner compared herself to a “lotus flower, blooming over and over again against all odds, emerging stronger each time”.
