Mel B’s New Husband Hasn’t Bashed Her About Yet

It takes a special woman to rebound out of a ridiculously messy relationship with Eddie Murphy into the arms of someone even less appropriate, but then again Mel B has always been nothing if not 'special'.

Mel B's sudden new husband Stephen Belafonte has been labelled a wife-beater in the press after it emerged that he got drunk four years ago and attacked his common-law wife. But now Mel B has gone on the offensive, telling anyone who'll listen that Stephen Belafonte is really a kind man who has never had a violent thought in his life because all his brainpower is used up by daydreams about puppydogs and moonbeams. However, Mel B might have spoken too soon - not only do court papers heavily imply that Stephen Belafonte hit his wife, he also executive-produced The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which we're taking to be a kind of galactic form of wife abuse that's affected everyone who's ever seen it.

There's one big difference between you and Mel B. No, it's not the money or the inability to hold a conversation without sounding like a gruff Yorkshireman screaming down a well, it's this: if you were in a relationship with Eddie Murphy, got an Eddie Murphy tattoo and quickly fell pregnant by Eddie Murphy only for him to dump you on Dutch TV and not even acknowledge the baby until it had been born so that everyone could be DNA tested, you'd probably want to lay low for a while until your bruised faith in men had been restored. Whereas Mel B will just marry the most unsuitable man she can find. 

That lucky man is movie producer Stephen Belafonte, who Mel B secretly married in June. At first glance the world imagined that Stephen Belafonte would be a step up from Eddie Murphy, on the basis that police never stopped him with a transsexual prostitute and that he wasn't in Norbit. But it didn't take long to emerge that Mel B had married a man who, in 2003, was charged with battery after he attacked his wife Nicole Contreras. Although Belafonte's only punishment was to be sent on a 'Domestic Violence Batterers' Programme' it's enough for his reputation as a wife-beater to stick. Oh, and he once killed a duck with a brick too, apparently.

Anyway, Mel B is outraged that anyone could possibly think that a man who was charged with beating up his wife actually beat up his his wife and - now that even Mel B's mother disapproves - every waking moment of Mel B's life appears to be dedicated to clearing Stephen Belafonte's name. This Is London reports:

She told Hello! magazine: "They're trying to make him out to be this aggressive, violent, woman batterer and he's not. If you read those police reports, they never say he physically beat up a woman." She added: "The only thing I don't like is that my friends and family read this and go into shock-horror mode, thinking, 'Oh, she's married a psychopath!'." Mel, who married Belafonte, 32, in June after a whirlwind romance claims she knew of his past and said he is a changed man… Mel admitted: "He hasn't been the best of people. I know everything that he's done. He went through group therapy and counselling, but he's fully aware of what he's done."

Of course we'd be idiots to assume that, just because of one little indiscretion a number of years ago, Stephen Belafonte will soon start battering Mel B. Not only has the batterers' programme, counselling and therapy awoken Stephen Belafonte as to why his previous behaviour was so wildly unacceptable, but we also get the impression that Mel B will attack Belafonte, hurl his broken body against a wall and repeatedly stamp on his windpipe if he ever tries any of that nonsense. or even looks at her funny when she's in one of her moods.

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Mel B: My New Husband Is Not A Wife-Beater - This Is London