As Ashley Roberts speaks out on her struggles during her girl group years, where are the other Pussycat Dolls?

Daily Mail​

3 days ago

The Pussycat Dolls was the ultimate girl group, and it took the pop world by storm in the early 2000s but in 2010 the six members called it a day - and plans for a reunion tour in 2020 were ruined by the pandemic.
One original member Ashley Roberts opened up about her struggles during her time in the group and explained how ill she got due to stress, and health professionals feared she had a brain aneurysm after a severe bout of sickness and headaches.
Since quitting the band, Ashley's moved away from musical performances to become a successful showbiz correspondent - but what happened to Nicole Scherzinger, Kimberly Wyatt, Melody Thornton, Jessica Sutta, and Carmit Bachar?
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Ashley Roberts
Since leaving the band, Ashley appeared on several reality TV shows, including I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, The Jump, and Strictly Come Dancing.
In 2019, she became the showbiz correspondent for Heart's Breakfast radio show.
Since 2022, she's been a presenter on Heart 00s, a spin-off from the radio network.
Ashley's in a relationship with boyfriend George Rollinson, 25, and they've been dating since November 2023.
Last year, the 43-year-old revealed she was in a 'happy place': 'It's really nice to be in a relationship that's kind and thoughtful and supportive and we have fun'.
Despite being part of the iconic girl band, behind the scenes Ashely paid the price for trying to keep up with the high-energy performances and intense schedule.
She revealed on Paul Brunson's podcast We Need To Talk details of the terrifying health scare she experienced during her time in the band, and her decades-long battle with insomnia.
She said: 'When my body started shutting down, I thought, OK, it is time to take a pause.'
Explaining just how ill she got, Ashley said: 'We were in London doing a gig and I was sick and I was like 'Ok I'm just ill, you know, probably caught something.
'I was vomiting and had extreme headaches and I'm thinking, "This it isn't getting any better and we I need to get on a flight to Germany."
'I ended up going to the hospital and they said, "We think you are having a brain aneurysm. So we need you to chill."
'I was like, "Well, I need to get on a plane."
'Then, as I am walking to the MRI, my knee locks up and it turns out I had viral arthritis, I didn't even know this was a thing. So I couldn't bend my knee.
'My body was just, like, stop. I was having some kind of reaction to a virus that I had caught - but I was, like, the show must go on.'
When she left the group, Ashley's health took another knock, believed to have been caused by intense stress.
She said: 'There was a literal physical manifestation of stored emotion in my body that has to come somewhere right?
'Unless you have got some sort of release the body is going to try and get it out and I feel like that's what my body was trying to do.
'I had eczema all over my legs, I had a stomach ulcer, I had shingles on my chin. I think stress was at the root from a young age and I was lucky to have performing and dance as an outlet but I think my body had been used to holding stress in.'
Nicole Scherzinger
Since The Pussycat Dolls disbanded, Nicole's seemed to have had the most successful run, and she's engaged to rugby player Thom Evans.
Nicole's proved herself as a global success, and won Dancing With The Stars in the U.S., then joined the judging panel on the UK's X Factor.
Her singing career's continued to blossom, and she reached number one in the UK charts with her song Don't Hold Your Breath.
More recently, Nicole revealed her eyes were set on a career in Hollywood, after she was awarded her first Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical for her performance as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
After selling 55 million records worldwide with The Pussycat Dolls and her Broadway gong, Nicole's revealed her movie dreams.
She told The Sun: 'I would like to do movies and movie musicals. I would like to build my own show, there are roles I would like to create. You never know where your unexpected dream opportunity is going to come from.'
Kimberly Wyatt
Kimberly said her world 'came crashing down' when the Pussycat Dolls reunion was axed - and it left her broke.
She got married to Max Rogers, also 43, in February 2014, and they're parents to three children.
The singer and dancer opened up about how her family life was impacted when the much-talked about tour fell through.
She told the Mile Fly Club with Laura Hamilton podcast that at that time, she had cleared her schedule to make way for the concerts - but she went into 'panic mode' when it was axed.
Kimberly said: 'Three young kids, paying school fees, and all these things - it changed our world. We had to rejig our entire life because of it.
'You end lots of your work to open all this space to go on the road, so when it all comes crashing down it was panic mode.'
However, Kimberly's become a popular face on UK TV since her pop star days: she won the BBC's Celebrity MasterChef series in 2015, took part in The Jump, appeared on the E4's All Star Driving School, and competed on ITV's Dancing On Ice in 2022.
Kimberly's gone on to become a presenter on Hits Radio, and deejayed at celebrity events across the UK.
Melody Thornton
When the band needed to bolster its vocal strength and opened auditions for new members in 2003, Melody jumped at the chance.
Melody left the group in 2010, and said at the time: 'I got into the group to sing. That was made very clear to me but it became more and more apparent what was going on.
'Roles were being minimized and minimized and then, by the time it got on the show, it was very much like, "Y'all play your part and this is what it is."'
Melody, 40, went bagged a cameo in Keri Hilson's video for the track Slow Dance, and she also released her first official single Sweet Vendetta in 2011.
She's appeared on several TV shows, including reality series Bank Of Hollywood, and ITV in the UK's Dancing On Ice.
Melody also competed on ITV's Popstar To Operastar and Celebrity Island.
When the Dolls were set to reunite in 2019, Melody did not join them because the timing 'wasn't right' for her.
In 2010, Jessica left the Pussycat Dolls to embark on a solo career.
That same year, she released her first single I Wanna Be Bad, but it failed to chart anywhere except in Slovakia - where it peaked at number 65 in the charts.
However, Jessica's second single Show Me gained a bit more success and got to number 1 in the U.S. Billboard charts' Hot Dance Club Songs.
Jessica married Mikey Marquet in 2019, and they've got a four-year-old son together.
She recently opened up about being unable to play with her son or return to the stage for over three years due to her battle with a life-changing vaccine-related injury, which caused her to have debilitating muscle spasms, tremors, and fatigue.
Her symptoms came on within days of receiving her second dose of the Moderna Covid vaccine in December 2021.
Jessica said: 'I woke up with a muscle spasm in my right rib that just would not get out. It felt like a knife inside was burning. It wrapped around my rib cage and up and down my spine, and it felt like I was on the brink of death.'
The spasms, which she's continued to endure, then gave way to tremors in her legs and involuntary head jerks, which since subsided.
However, she still felt as though her body's been 'completely hijacked'.
To make matters worse, while her fellow Pussycat Dolls bandmates accepted her experience, she was dubbed an anti-vaxxer for speaking out.
She said: 'I'm willing to risk my reputation so this doesn't happen to anyone else.
'There are many people in the industry way bigger than me with a bigger outreach with vaccine injuries but they won't speak out. And, for me, I just couldn't hold my tongue.'
She added that she did not consider herself anti-vaccine: 'I do believe in the technology in hindsight, right? But I will not blindly trust the medical system ever again after what happened to me. I'm not "anti" anything. I'm just anti being sick.'
Carmit Bachar
Carmit, 50, was one of Pussycat Dolls' main vocalists, and she was famous before then having previously danced on stage with Beyonce and performed as the Livin' La Vida Loca girl on Ricky Martin's tour in 1999 and 2000.
Since quitting the band in 2008, Carmit's focused on her music career.
She formed the pop group LadyStation in 2011 and released the single Body In Motion, and ended 2018 with the release of the single It's Time, followed by the track How Far.
Carmit also collaborated with Macy Gray in 2010 on her album The Sellout.
She's mom to daughter Keala Rose, 13, and Carmit's also a campaigner for cleft-palate charities having suffered with the congenital condition herself as a child.