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Daily Mirror
23-04-2025
- Daily Mirror
Beyonce's mum Tina Knowles stripped naked in brutal police checks for simple traffic offence
She might be the mother of a superstar pop star legend but there's more to Tina Knowles than just being a 'momager' as her new memoir reveals in shocking, graphic detail There are moments which can change a life for ever. For Tina Knowles, one was the day she was driven, barefoot and afraid, through the main streets of her hometown of Galveston, Texas - in the back of the police car. The driver had apparently taken a deliberate detour through her neighbourhood, parading his 'perpetrator'. It was intended to humiliate her - to be a drive of shame. But, as she would later come to realise, the shame of that moment should never have been hers. It only ever should have belonged to the white cop at the wheel. For the same cop, she claims, called her friends 'monkeys' and likened her neighbourhood to a 'zoo'. He was the same cop there the night officers pulled a gun on her brother Skip - for the crime, she says, of drunkenly passing out on a neighbour's porch. And he was the same cop who - along with his pals - had been known to pull over her hard-working father on a higher than usual number of traffic stops. Tina's 'crime' that day, aged 20, in 1974 was to ride barefoot on a dirt bike (it was her 'hippie' phase). It was a traffic violation - but one for which she should be quickly bailed. Instead she says the cop and his colleagues insisted on a full strip and cavity search. 'It was the most humiliating, horrible thing,' Tina this week recalled. 'When it was over, I put my clothes back on, trying to put an armour of dignity over me too.' It's a tale of prejudice which sadly is not unfamiliar even today. But it's also a snapshot of Tina's younger years that answers an enduring mystery in showbiz - what kind of woman does it take to raise a global icon, activist and role model like Beyonce? The answer? A strong one. Tina, 71, has now shared this story for the first time in her no-holds barred memoir, Matriarch. But it was by far not the only bombshell about her life. From racism to cheating husbands to her recent breast cancer ordeal, the woman born Celestine Ann Beyoncé, in Texas, 1954, has not had it easy. The youngest of seven siblings, her mum was a seamstress and her dad was a longshoreman. Their surname was Beyince, but a typo on Tina's birth certificate meant she was officially Tina 'Beyonce' - a slip up by a clerk that would change pop culture. Her early life was affected by the racism in the Southern states, but she had a clear passion: singing. She formed a girl group The Veltones, inspired by The Supremes as a teen, but her dreams of stardom ended early when she had to look after her elderly parents. By 26, she had met and married a run-of-the-mill Xerox salesman Mathew Knowles. But Tina was not meant for a little life in Galveston. Although it would be her daughters Beyonce, born in 1981, and Solange in 1986, who would help her achieve that singing success she never personally did. And they didn't do it by halves. By 16, Beyonce was in Destiny's Child. Mathew quit the day job to be the band's manager and the family never looked back. However, as Tina shares in her new memoir - and as we know from their acrimonious split - success put more pressure on her already tempestuous marriage. In a bombshell claim in the book, Tina reveals Mathew was already a ladies' man when the girls were small. In fact, she even suspected him of cheating in the days after she had given birth to Solange - after he picked her up from the hospital and dropped her at a friends' house with the newborn baby and five-year-old Beyonce, announcing he had to fly to a conference in Atlanta. 'I suspected that a woman was involved,' Tina says in her book Matriarch. 'We had a huge blowout at the hospital, but he wouldn't budge. Sure enough, the next day he dropped me, Beyoncé, and our newborn off [at the friend's]. He practically ran out of the house to his getaway car, I said to myself, 'Okay, I'm done.'' She left him. But, like other times to follow, she ended up going back. This time her return was the fault of the friend's rottweiler, 'Killer'. 'Killer charged up the stairs and he snapped, foaming at the mouth and growling as loud as a freight train,' she recalls, claiming he was aggravated by her perfume. So when Mathew called grovelling for her to come back later that night she reluctantly agreed. 'I was so annoyed with myself for having escaped a lousy marriage to almost get killed,' she adds in her book. 'I felt I had no choice but to go back and reclaim our home—but only under one condition….' The condition was that they got intensive counselling. They were still trapped in their love/hate relationship years later when Tina this week revealed she accidentally spilt a pan of boiling grease on herself while frying fish. The police arrived before the ambulance and proceeded to quiz her on whether Mathew had actually done it to her.. 'Even at a time like this, we were suspect. Presumed guilty,' she writes in her book. She was furious. But not as furious as Mathew allegedly was at the hospital, when Tina was lying screaming in pain and doctors were dragging their feet. She claims he flipped over a doctor's tray in frustration - and that only made her love him more. 'Mathew finally broke. My crazy husband, the man I loved, turned over a tray in rage,' she claims in the book. ''Give my wife some fucking pain medicine. Give her something right now'.' Their dynamic and what Tina calls their 'cosmic' pull is perhaps the reason she later did the unthinkable: After learning he'd fathered a child Nixon, now 15, with his mistress Alexsandra Wright in 2009, she filed for divorce. But a few months later, he visited her where she was living in New York - and this time she became The Other Woman. 'He'd changed after new counseling,' she recalls in her 432-page tell-all. 'He was persistent, proved he'd gotten help, and as he courted me, I found myself falling in love again.' The pair had an affair for a year - before he allegedly cheated on her again and in 2011, it was over for good. She went on to marry actor Richard Lawson in 2015 but split with him in 2023, saying: 'I wanted someone to be happy when I walked in the room'. It's telling that Beyonce has had more than her share of her own marital problems. The infamous Met Gala fight between Solange and Jay-Z will go down in history. And yet she too, like her mum, has fought hard for her marriage to work. But love life troubles are by far the least thing the mum and daughter have in common. They both were as driven for Beyonce to be a success as each other. Indeed, the superstar was just nine when Tina faced one of her hardest moments of motherhood. Beyonce was in school girl group Gyrl's Time but came home crying one day. The teachers had reassigned all her parts to another girl and Beyonce was demanding Tina go and shout at them. Tina said No. 'I couldn't just be her mom for that moment; I needed to be her mom for her whole life,' she explains in her book. So she told her: ''That girl is not your competition. You are your only competition and that's how it always will be. You gotta work harder'.' That was the first time Beyonce told her mum 'I hate you' - but a few months later she was thanking her for the tough love. And the unstoppable determination and work ethic of Beyonce was born. A few years later Tina did something else controversial: she put a teenage Beyonce and Solange into joint therapy sessions to eradicate what she saw as the beginnings of sibling rivalry. Then when Beyonce was 16, her friend - and soon-to-be Destiny's Child bandmate Kelly Rowland grew so close to the family she started calling Mathew 'dad'. Tina had a tough talk with Bey about not being jealous. Perhaps the most important advice she gave her daughter however was when it came to Jay-Z. Tina lets slip in her book that Beyonce was seeing two men at the same time when they first started dating. Both men had been travelling to see the Crazy in Love singer on the set of 2002's Austin Powers in Goldmember. Tina doesn't name the other man, but it's thought it may have been high school boyfriend, Lyndall Locke, whom she dated from 1993 to 2001. Beyonce was lost on what to do and asked Tina for advice. She asked her daughter to answer one simple question: 'Who do you enjoy talking to more?' 'I watched her think. It was Jay,' Tina writes. 'Isn't it humbling how love can begin with such a simple feeling? You're 21 years old and you can't know someday you will take that love to the stars, but it begins with such a small instinct.' The Mama bear instinct kicked in in a slightly different way when Solange fell pregnant aged 17 and declared she was going to get married to her then boyfriend, Daniel Smith, however. Tina confesses she rang Daniel to convince him not to marry her daughter. He dutifully called Solange to say perhaps they should wait. Solange took it about as well as a young Tina would have done. According to Daniel, Solange had replied: 'F*** you, and f*** my mama, because I know [she] put you up to this.' Tina backed down, arranged a dream wedding in just three days and somehow wangled a private plane and service on a remote island belonging to John Travolta. Because at the end of the day she would move mountains to give her kids what they wanted. And Solange just wanted one gift for her wedding: privacy away from the circus that came with her sister's fame. Tina would later give that same present to Beyonce when she finished a gruelling world tour, taking her back to her home neighbourhood in Galveston, where the superstar could go almost unnoticed out of her popstar get up. Beyonce's only wish was to go to Walgreen's - the US answer to Boots. 'When we left, she was glowing, so empowered,' writes Tina, 'Not a single person approached her. Not one. It felt like a fairy tale.' Tina's bond with her daughters was once again cemented last year when the mum went for a routine mammogram - having not been for four years because of the pandemic. Doctors found two cancerous tumours. It was stage one - the second stage under the American system. Tina was nonplussed: 'I had been through all of this stuff in life getting to be seventy years old, and now I'm gonna get cancer?,' she writes. Beyonce moved Tina into her home and sat in on appointments. And when it came to the day of her lumpectomy, the daughters sat with her in the ward ahead of her being taken down to surgery and sang Destiny's Child Walk With Me. 'It's about God walking with you and protecting you,' Tina recalled in her interview on US TV this week. 'And I went in there feeling just like God has got me.' A year on, she's now cancer-free and happily one of the Single Ladies for the first time in decades. For like everything in this Galveston girl's life - be it police harassment, racism, cheating spouses or how to raise a star - she faced it head on. And like her daughter sings, she's a survivor.
CBS News
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Tina Knowles opens up on motherhood, Destiny's Child, divorces and healing: "I am enough"
Tina Knowles, the mother of global music superstars Beyoncé and Solange, is opening up about her personal relationship with her mother, details about her divorces, her own parenting and the girl group Destiny's Child. Knowles, a businesswoman, fashion designer and former stylist for Destiny's Child, is telling her life story in her memoir, "Matriarch," where she reveals a complicated but loving relationship with her own mother, who she described as "overprotective" and "fearful." At one point, Knowles said she wanted to be a singer herself and was even in a girl group known as The Veltones. "I wanted to be a singer, but you know, this little town was about that big and there were no singers there and that's what my mom said. My mom, as, you know, as much as I loved her and she wanted the best for me, she would've done anything for me to be a singer, she really didn't have any hope." She told "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King in an exclusive interview that that aspect of her upbringing influenced how she parented. "I was gonna trust my kids and even though I never believed in being friends, … but I wanted to be trusted by them," she said, adding that she wanted them to know the sky was the limit when it came to achieving their dreams. "'Cause my parents put limitations on me. Not because they wanted to, because they didn't want me to be disappointed or hurt," she said. "I told my girls that all the time, you could be whatever you wanna be. You could do whatever you wanna do and I'm gonna be right there to help make it happen." Impact on parenting Knowles spoke with King about how different her daughters were growing up. She said once a teacher recommended Beyoncé repeat a grade in school. Knowles said, now a global superstar, Beyoncé was shy and quiet until she got to know people. "Never shy around us," Knowles said. "At home, she was entertaining. She was singing, she was dancing and she was doing all the things that I did. … So she would get quiet until she got to know you." A former teacher told Knowles in her evaluation that Beyoncé was a bright student. "I took her to Ms. Little. ... Was an ex-teacher there who was very stern, but she said, 'there's nothing wrong with this girl. This girl is very bright. She just doesn't care to let you know it.'" Conversely, Knowles described Solange as "very outgoing" and would "walk into the room and be like, 'yes, I'm here.'" When Beyoncé and Solange were 12 and 7 years old, Knowles put them in therapy together. It was a controversial decision within her own family as her then husband, Mathew Knowles, objected. "He was like, 'I don't want any parts of that,'" Knowles said. For Knowles it was important as she started to see separation between her two daughters. "Beyoncé had become like this little star in the town and she was always so close to Solange and so kind to her, but then she was in the singing group, so everything took place in our house," she said. The other girls in the group would tell Solange to shut up and be quiet and all that and I started noticing that she wasn't protecting her sister." Knowles' goal through therapy was to ensure the two grew up close, telling King, "whatever I have to do to make that happen." Beginnings of Destiny's Child Knowles said she tried to be a singer, and although for her it didn't work out, she used her skills to help her daughters achieve their dreams. "God has always given me these tools from day one that I could go back and pull out and who would've ever thought that I would wind up making costumes for Destiny's Child? Or that I would be doing hair and all the things I did for our group and even the rehearsals and the discipline of that and the harmonies … I got to use it with the girls," she said. But Knowles admits there were problems along the way. She said the label didn't like the way she styled Destiny's Child. "They dressed like an R&B group. We love the big glamour. And their hair was too big 'cause we came from Texas," she said. "They just thought that it was too much for those young girls and that they should be in jeans and t-shirts like all the pop icons at the time. In the meantime, everywhere we went, people were saying,' Where can we get these outfits?'" Knowles said the criticism from the label hurt her feelings, but it was a moment she remembers her husband, Mathew, pushing back. "He was just bold and when I talk about him, that's one of the things that he went to bat for me all the time, he fought, he protected me." Navigating marriage and parenting criticisms Knowles also wrote candidly in her memoir about the highs and lows of her 30-year marriage to Mathew Knowles. She said from the beginning, there was infidelity in their marriage on his part and she realized she needed to be prepared. "I was pregnant and things were — they just got really bad at that time. I knew that I had to make a move and I didn't want to be dependent on him," she said. She started planning what she called her escape plan. Knowles opened a hair salon called Headliners, which was so successful it became the family's main source of income and helped to fund Beyoncé's budding musical career. Mathew Knowles left his sales executive role at Xerox and started working as Destiny's Child's manager full-time. Their partnership as parents helped to hold their marriage together. "People say to me, 'how did you stay so long?' And I'm like, 'well, I was married for 33 years, but 33 years were not bad.' … You know, maybe 15 of them were bad, but we would have these long stretches where we would do really great." While their marriage struggled, Knowles said they were always present parents, but subject to scrutiny. She recalled the criticism people would say after Solange became pregnant as a teenager. "Crazy stuff like, 'well you wasn't paying no attention. You're so busy running behind B that you couldn't see' — blah, blah, blah. I'm like, 'that is absolutely not true.'" Knowles went on to say, people didn't understand Solange's history. "They didn't know the backstory of Solange losing her best friend and wanting to hurry up and be a grownup 'cause she thought she wouldn't live so long." Knowles said Solange made it clear she was getting married. "I said, 'OK, well let me at least give you a wedding,' you know, and made it memorable for her, but you can't control somebody else's life. It's their life." Knowles also wrote about an untrue rumor that surfaced during Beyoncé's first pregnancy, where people said she wasn't carrying the baby. "She went on a show in Australia and she had this very broad cloth type of dress," Knowles said about Beyoncé. "She wasn't huge pregnant. She was very proud of her little stomach and she bent over and the fabric of the dress bent … they started this vicious, horrible rumor that she wasn't pregnant." Knowles expressed her heartache over the situation and anger over people thinking her daughter faked a pregnancy and used prosthetics. "I was never so enraged because this should have been a sacred experience and what they didn't know is that my child had been through a couple miscarriages, which were so painful." Knowles admitted she did not speak up even as the devastating rumor escalated, saying that Beyoncé thought it would go away and handles these situations well. "I'm not so good at that. I will cuss you out about my kids," Knowles said. "That was one of the worst times of my life. It really was. I would cry, I would get so mad and I would get so upset." Divorces and moving forward When she decided to get divorced from Mathew Knowles, she said she spent a week in bed depressed. Her longtime therapist gave her an exercise to do: Make a list of accomplishments and failures. "I had such an easy time writing the bad stuff. When I got to the positive stuff, I had such a hard time," she said. "What I realized about myself is that I wasn't really comfortable with people telling me great things about me." She said she had not taken credit for some of her accomplishments in the past, like her work with Destiny's Child in an effort to be humble. She would tell herself, "it's not about you." But then she started making her list. "I started getting mad and writing those things down," she said. "I started my salon. It was a success. You know, I raised some great kids. All the people I've met in my life, like I have had a hell of a life." Four years after her divorce from Mathew Knowles, Tina Knowles married actor Richard Lawson. They were together for 10 years. She said she feels grateful for the relationship, even though it ultimately ended. "I've known Richard for 40-something years and I think he's a great person," she said. "So I don't have any regrets about the time that we spent together. I did feel a lot of pressure about ending the marriage because I had so many people to come up to me and tell me about that hope, but – it's not a tragedy." She said she would love to find love again, but is at peace if she doesn't. "I am finally feeling — it is sad that I'm 71 years old and I know that I am enough and if I don't I'm gonna be just fine because I got such a full, great life. And I'm so blessed, and you know, it's gonna be – it's all good."
