a day ago
- Entertainment
- Cosmopolitan
Tulisa, in her own words, on her orchestrated public downfall: "What I experienced was pure evil"
She did something we've all done. Drunk and hyped-up, Tulisa put on a front and pretended to be someone she wasn't. She took her council estate upbringing and added more grit: She knew dealers and gangsters… the men in front of her wanted a 'bad girl." So that was exactly who she would be.
A few months earlier, she'd been flown out to Vegas by a group of Bollywood producers who said they wanted her for the role of a lifetime. They were going to pay her millions, have her starring opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and, over dinner, as they plied her with alcohol, the producers dangled the role in front of her. All they needed, they said, in order to bag the role, was for her to convince them she was the character.
Except, Tulisa wasn't speaking to Bollywood producers. There was no movie role. She was talking to an undercover news reporter, and everything she said was recorded and splashed all over the front pages. 'TULISA'S COCAINE DEAL SHAME' The Sun headline read. She was labelled a 'dealer' because she had handed over a phone number, a friend-of-a-friend who she knew could get his hands on cocaine. She didn't even do drugs. But the truth didn't matter. Her career was in tatters. And then, the police showed up, at her front door: she was being charged with intent to supply a Class A drug.
Today, 12 years on from the trial that almost stripped her of everything, Tulisa is ready to talk. Ready to confront the reality of what happened to her. She feverishly kept a diary throughout the years of her orchestrated downfall, aged 24 to 26. Now, she's opened them up and turned them into Judgement: Love, Trials and Tribulations, a moment-by-moment and unflinching look at the damage caused when the public turns against a woman in the public eye. A few weeks before publication, she sat down with Cosmopolitan UK, to share the true impact the trial had on her, and where she's been since…
"I want, by the end of this book, for people to understand what actually happened." Wide-eyed and tiny, at 5ft 5in, Tulisa - full name Tula Paulinea Contostavlos - sits in front of me in her glass-fronted publisher's office. "This book is me saying, here's my whole truth, think what you want, but, at least base it on the truth."
I tell her that I consumed the book in a day and a half, that it reads like part-thriller, part-romance but that it's crystal clear that she was unfairly hung out to dry, that she did not deserve any of what happened to her. That it would be understandable if she struggled to trust anyone, ever again. But, she replies that she does trust. That she has to.
'We're all here for human connection,' she says. 'No matter how much trauma you go through, you can't give up on love – and I don't just mean romantic love. I'm not going to let lower vibrational energies drag me to their level of darkness.'
But it's been a long road to get here. One that's seen Tulisa, now 37, face PTSD from the gruelling impact of the trial, alongside an addiction (which she's now battled) to prescription sleeping pills. Her mental health plummeted so low that she attempted to take her own life. As, while the sting itself was a brutal; a cruel attempt to take a woman down at the peak of her career (At the time, she was the youngest ever judge on The X Factor and had coached Little Mix to their win), it was how the public responded to the story that has always struck me as equally cruel and unfair. She had her supporters, but, many made their mind up about her: that she was a drug dealer, and that she deserved what was coming to her.
'Someone wanted to take me down a peg or two,' Tulisa says now, when I ask her why she thinks the reporter, Mazher Mahmood, and The Sun, entrapped her this way. I tell her, to me, it feels like grooming – the entire sting cost £300,000, and throughout they kept her hanging for months, flipping between ultimate flattery and taunts, such as 'I thought you were a party girl' as they topped up her drink, cajoling her to bring out her 'wild' side. 'They couldn't get me taking drugs, as I didn't take them. That's what they wanted at first, and then they had to go this other route.'
When I ask the Cosmopolitan UK team what they think of Tulisa, the overarching theme is: 'the OG girl boss' and 'iconic.' Her brand and alter-ego 'the female boss' was tattooed on her forearm, which she'd hold up as the camera panned The X Factor judges at the beginning of the show. We've seen, time and time again, women who feel comfortable and strong in their own skin, are piled upon and destroyed. Tulisa's case has always felt like a prime example of that. In the book she writes, 'I appeared like the definition of a ruthless, egotistical bitch.' But why should women have to show themselves to be weak, in order to receive sympathy and compassion? Besides, the woman sitting in front of me isn't a bitch and doesn't seem ruthless. She simply seems in control of her life, and what she wants.
'It was classism, sexism, chav-ism, the whole lot,' she says, smiling ruefully, about the sting and the way the public went for her afterwards. 'There was already dislike [for me]. I was 'too big for my boots', 'get back to Camden', that sort of energy. So when they had something on me, they jumped.'
The public perception of Tulisa was so low that when her case was taken to court, she feared that judgement would seep into the jury's point of view and influence their decision. Every day she showed up to court, to a sea of paparazzi, and flashing bulbs and, on the very first day, her nose began to bleed. 'A fucking nosebleed in a cocaine trial,' she says, able to laugh about it now. 'I knew exactly what they were going to say.'
Thankfully, Mahmood was exposed as lying on the stand, and the case was thrown out. In October 2016, he was jailed for 15 months, after being found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. He is now known, and notorious, for his entrapments and deeply unethical form of journalism, but, back then, Tulisa took the fall. The case was over, but the damage was done.
'There was, an actual, very serious [suicide] attempt,' she tells me. 'There was also this moment of real depression where I was driving in my car, hysterically crying, and there was so much trauma that I had an out of body experience. It was like my brain was going so nuts that I had to physically detach the two.
'When I'm in that low a place, I give myself a time frame. I say 'just wait six months from now and control all the things I can control and see if I can get into a happier place. And… 10 times out of 10 [I've] reached that place.'
When the trial was ongoing, Instagram was yet to take off, so Twitter was the online hunting ground for those who wanted to troll and harass celebrities. 'My manager would have to look at everything,' she says. 'I'm a little better now but there was a period where anything would completely trigger me.' The impact of having that much public hate and judgement left her with PTSD. She said, recently, for a court case she was asked to look over old stories about her. '[I said] 'if I have to sit here and look through them all, I'll have a nervous breakdown.'
During her court case, Tulisa writes that she 'felt like an animal in a cage, for everyone's entertainment.' A police officer even mouthed blow-job signals at her, while she sat in the dock.
This is something we see, over and over again, when it comes to female celebrities: Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Lindsey Lohan, to name three off-the-top-of-my-head. When celebrities are facing their most traumatic moments, their pictures are seen by everyone, from bleeding ballet flats to umbrellas being raised in the air. Many feast upon their trauma, seeing it as their 'right' because of all the privilege celebrities are bestowed. The day I meet Tulisa, I open my phone to see multiple pictures of Sharon Osbourne at her husband's funeral, the grief etched all over her face. It doesn't feel like something I should see, yet with every scroll, more images appear. I ask Tulisa what she thinks can be done to end the cycle.
'It comes from not seeing people as humans, and I do think [we] are becoming more empathetic. But the only thing that can [bring] change is more awareness, but how do you do that?' she muses. 'I'm not 100% sure as it's very hard as a celebrity to sit here and moan. People can think 'but you live the life of Riley' and there is a [need] for acceptance as I wanted to come into this world, I knew the perks and these are the downfalls.
'When it comes to judgment, the majority of the time, it's about a value. And sometimes the way that we put value on females as a society isn't the most positive. Mostly women are judged for how old they are, how they look, their sexual activity… It can come down to your looks and your status, your upbringing, all the things that aren't relevant. What's relevant is on the inside. We need to dig deeper and to look below the surface.'
Because of everything she went through, Tulisa feels that the media, and public, give her a 'bit of a hall pass.' Which has helped as she, tentatively, enters back into the public eye again. There was her stint on last year's I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! and the year before, she reunited with her bandmates, Dappy and Fazer, for a N Dubz reunion tour. It came, she says, 'fresh out of a [period] of being a proper hermit, I was feeling super agoraphobic a month before the tour. I was still coming off the [sleeping pills] and I was sat in bed with a heart rate of 110. I couldn't imagine being on stage, performing. But then on the first night it was like… freedom.' I ask if she has any plans for solo music (selfishly, as 'We Are Young' is still on my gym playlist) and she says her focus is more on 'the business stuff, investing in businesses and property.' Female Boss.
When I arrived, Tulisa told me that good things are on their way to Cancerians (we're both the star-sign) and showed the '69' symbolic necklace hanging around her neck. She mentions signs, and energies, a lot through our chat. It's clear these are the beliefs that helped her to survive. 'I've had therapy, but it was when I was coming off [the pills]. I'm not against it but I'm always thinking about my own psychology and talking myself through things. Everyone's different but for me, it just seems to make me feel worse.'
A few weeks before we met, Tulisa's dad, Steve Contostavlos, died, so her book tour and promotion is taking place during her fresh grief. 'It's been an emotional rollercoaster. I have my day when I'm super accepting that this is a part of life, and then I have days when I don't want to get out of bed. Before he died, there was a magpie knocking on my window, so I still get spiritual, I still have my premonitions. I'm just still in that healing phase.'
In the book, Tulisa says she reached a place of empathy for Mahmood, knowing that hurt people, hurt others. I ask her if she's still in that headspace. 'I was in that place of forgiveness and empathy, and, for about five years after the trial, I was very love and light. But then spiritually, I felt like I was being led to tap back into my dark side to balance it out. I've realised I don't have to hate someone, but I don't have to like them. I don't have to feel anything. I can pick and choose who I show kindness to, or not, as long as I am not reciprocating that dark energy.'
And it was extremely dark energy that she felt emanated off of Mahmood, during all of their meetings. 'I always felt something dodgy about him, so now I know trust your instincts, as whenever I do get that feeling they turn out to be an absolute wanker,' she says. 'In that situation, it was an exchange, I want this job. You're going to give it to me and I don't have to like you. But now I'm more aware of that, I want to work with good people.'
Reading Judgement at times feels like reading a thriller, and as a reader you're powerless to stop Tulisa falling for the lies of Mahmood and his accomplices. It's also clear just how manipulative they were, with Tulisa and her friends feeling as if they were also spiked the night of the main recording. 'It felt very evil, probably the most amount of evil that I've ever experienced. For someone to set their sights on [me] and go out of their way to hurt a person in such a way. [That's] very cruel and very dark.'
To have experienced such deception, where an entire world is concocted around you, one of fake characters, fake deals and a fake future, I find it miraculous that Tulisa is able to trust people. Throughout our conversation, everyone from those in the justice system to journalists are given empathy with the acknowledgement that 'in all areas of life there's lovely, great humans and [there's also] fucking assholes.'
Her secret to this level of peace is to 'take control of what you can in this world, and go after what it is that makes you happy, holding your boundaries as high as possible.'
As for the future, alongside her business investments, Tulisa feels she's got more books in her ('my life has so many stories') and is about to draw up her next five year plan. She recently froze her eggs, and we have a discussion about how to know whether you're ready or not to have kids. Dating is tricky. She's on Raya but her fame and public persona puts on pressure, so she ends up 'in cycles with people that I've got either long-term connections with, or with exes, or people I've known for 10 plus years.'
As for the Female Boss persona? She's back. 'I went through a period after the trial, where I've been quite vulnerable and fragile off the back of everything. But I've definitely come full circle now where I'm in a place of owning my confidence [and am] back to that savagery.' But, a spiritual savage. There's a lot we can all learn from how Tulisa pulled herself back from the brink, and stood stronger than ever.
Judgement: Love, Trials and Tribulations by Tulisa is out 14th August, here
If you need someone to speak to, Samaritans is on hand for anyone struggling, even if you do not feel suicidal, and can be reached for free at any time on 116 123. Shout are also available 24/7 for text-based mental health support. You can reach them by texting 85258
Catriona Innes is Commissioning Director at Cosmopolitan, you can follow her on Substack and on Instagram.
Catriona Innes is Cosmopolitan UK's multiple award-winning Commissioning Editor, who has won BSME awards both for her longform investigative journalism as well as for leading the Cosmopolitan features department. Alongside commissioning and editing the features section, both online and in print, Catriona regularly writes her own hard-hitting investigations spending months researching some of the most pressing issues affecting young women today.
She has spent time undercover with specialist police forces, domestic abuse social workers and even Playboy Bunnies to create articles that take readers to the heart of the story. Catriona is also a published author, poet and volunteers with a number of organisations that directly help the homeless community of London. She's often found challenging her weak ankles in towering heels through the streets of Soho. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
