“What can I say? It was awful. I despised Ike on that level, but I didn’t know how to express myself,” said Arnold.
“I was told Tina wanted to get rid of me because Ike was after me,” Arnold added of Ike’s then-wife, Tina Turner. “If I had run to Tina or called my parents, it would have meant I would have [had] to come home.”
Arnold told the outlet she believed that her husband’s abuse would resume if she went back home.
She also revealed that she and her husband David were forced to get married following an unsuccessful abortion attempt with a sterilized coat hanger. At age 15, she carried the pregnancy to term and gave birth to Kevin. She later gave birth to Debbie at the age of 17.
Although she “dealt with it,” Arnold claims she also felt “deep anger” toward her husband’s abuse. In addition, she claimed that as a child, her father had beaten her.
She said, “Sadly, it was the way it was back then. I think it’s a lot to do with slavery and how that affected the black man’s psyche.”
“Mick was in heaven, but Marianne was more interested in me,” she writes in her memoir. “I had always been a good kisser, and so was she. I tried to let myself go, but I was also uncomfortable… ultimately it was Mick that I was infatuated with, not her. There was a plantation feel about it like I was a plaything.”
Also, in her memoir, the singer also recounts her friendship with Jimi Hendrix, sleeping with Rod Stewart, breaking into the music business, her second marriage to Jim Morris, and the birth of her third son Kojo in 1971.
She also opens up about the death of her daughter Debbie, who was 13 years old when she was killed in a car accident. “She was a very special spirit. I haven’t had a serious relationship at all since my daughter died. It’s very difficult to find a good man just in normal situations. But, you know, it ain’t over till it’s over.”
In the end, Arnold ended on a positive note, adding, “Well, I could do with one. What’s important is where I am right now,” she said. “How can I take all these years of experience and just do something great?”
