Spice Girl Mel B said one of the biggest stars in Hollywood once made her happier than any man she’d ever met. That man is comedian Eddie Murphy.
Still, despite being pregnant with his child, she broke it off with Murphy because she wanted to be treated as an equal in their relationship and on the red carpet.
The singer shared some background on why she and the “Coming to America” star broke up in 2006 in her tell-all 2018 memoir, “Brutally Honest.” In her mind, she was “just too big a star to make it work” with him.
“You know, he’s Eddie Murphy. And I’m like: ‘Well, I’m Mel B!’” she wrote then.
Adding, “If something doesn’t feel right, if it isn’t equal, then what’s the point? Yes, Eddie Murphy’s a massive star. In my eyes — Spice Girls — so am I.”
“I have my own house, my own car, my own credit card,” the chart-topper explained. “I don’t need to fall in line and be Pretty Woman, because I have my own life.”
“Eddie almost wanted to just go like that. But I have a career. I’m not just going to give that up for love… to be a housewife. There’s nothing wrong with being a housewife, but that wasn’t my path. It probably didn’t make sense to anybody at that time — why I would leave a relationship so full of love and giving, and almost nurturing.”
Mel B’s assessment would make one think that Murphy dated or married women who didn’t have larger-than-life careers.
In the early years of his career, one of the notable women in Murphy’s romantic orbit was the megastar Whitney Houston.
Still, that romance fizzled in the‘’80s, leaving room for the Long Island bachelor to settle down with the woman who would give him five children.
Murphy met Nicole Mitchell Murphy in 1988 and married her in 1993. The two stayed married for 12 years with Nicole filing for divorce in 2005.
In 1989, the “Norbit” star also dated Paulette McNeely and the two welcomed a son named Eric — who was born months before he had his first child with Nicole. Before marrying Nicole, Murphy dated a woman named Tamara Hood in 1990, blessing her with a son named Christian.
While Murphy appeared to be messy in his younger days, he seemed to change his ways as he matured. His relationship with Mel B did not start until he was divorced from Nicole and back in the dating pool as a single man.
Within months of dating, she became pregnant with their daughter Angel Iris. Mel B claims that she and Murphy were “soul mates” who got matching tattoos days after meeting. She insists that that the pregnancy was “completely planned” and that at the time she and the “Delirious” comic were planning to get married.
This was not only denied by Murphy on national television when he told the world before their relationship was over. He denied paternity until a DNA test confirmed he was the father in June 2007, two months after Angel Iris Murphy Brown was born.
Their public relationship seemed to disintegrate before everyone’s eyes, including her suing the Brooklyn entertainer for sole legal and physical custody of their little girl. Murphy would have little or no contact with the girl up until she was 10 years old. (Mel B’s ex-husband Stephen Belafonte was a huge barrier in the father and daughter building a relationship.)
Co-parenting was presumably going well until Mel B requested more child support in 2020, even though the “Beverly Hills Cop” star was initially paying $25,000 a month, as well as covering Angel’s health insurance and her educational costs. In 2022, the two reached an agreement increasing Murphy’s child support payment to $35,000 per month.
In the 2018 book, she said that Murphy was the love of her life and “always will be.”
According to the book, Mel B and Murphy were together for nine months after meeting at a Hollywood party, and their breakup had more to do with her being “a strong independent woman” than her having an unwanted baby.
Simply put, the “America’s Got Talent” host said, “It wasn’t coming together as equal as I wanted” and at the end of the day, she didn’t want to “be part of Eddie’s kingdom.”
Other women who have been a “part of Eddie’s kingdom” are filmmaker and his ex-wife Tracey Edmonds (2007 to 2008) and now his fiancée Australian model Paige Butcher.
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— Sam David Literary Management (@SamDavidAgency) December 22, 2019
He also shares son Eric, 30, with Paulette McNeely and son Christian, 29, with Tamera Hood. Spice Girl Mel B is the mother of Eddie’s 12-year-old daughter, Angel. pic.twitter.com/OmgOgWjMuD
The former “Saturday Night Live” cast member started dating Butcher in 2012 and had a baby with her, Izzy Oona, in 2016. Two years later he had his tenth child Max Charles. The couple have been engaged since 2018 and still have not tied the knot.
