The Daily Mail has acquired a harrowing excerpt from Tina Turner’s upcoming memoir, My Love Story, in which the singer details an abusive sexual relationship with her late ex-husband, Ike Turner. She writes that she didn’t want to marry him, even in 1962, but with four children between them she “didn’t have much choice.” She describes getting married in Tijuana without a license and Ike taking her to a “whorehouse” on their wedding night. Most distressing is the section on the early ‘70s, when Turner claims Ike started abusing cocaine because “someone had told him it would give him more stamina for sex…having sex was practically his full-time job.”
She writes:
“For me, though, sex with Ike had become an expression of hostility — a kind of rape — especially when it began or ended with a beating. What had been ugly and hateful between us before became worse with every snort of cocaine. He threw hot coffee in my face, giving me third-degree burns.
He used my nose as a punching bag so many times that I could taste blood running down my throat when I sang.
He broke my jaw. And I couldn’t remember what it was like not to have a black eye.
The people closest to us saw what was happening, but they couldn’t stop him: any attempt to help me would make him more violent.”
She also describes frequenting the emergency room because of the abuses Ike afflicted and “if the doctors thought it was unusual that I had so many ‘accidents,’ they didn’t say anything. They probably thought that was just the way black people were, always fighting.”
Read the full passage here.
Tina Turner’s My Love Story will be released on October 15.