Soul Survivor, which hits the stands on Thursday,
P.P. Arnold, the soul singer who performed as an Ikette with the Ike & Tina Turner Revenue, is opening up about her life in an upcoming memoir — and she makes a shocking allegation against Ike Turner.
While discussing her upcoming memoir Soul Survivor, Arnold tells The Telegraph, that Ike Turner once trapped her in a room and raped her in the mid-1960s. After the alleged sexual assault, Arnold struggled with her anger at Turner, who died in 2007 at the age of 76.
“What can I say? It was awful. I despised Ike on that level, but I didn’t know how to express myself,” said Arnold, now 75.
“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.”
According to Arnold, returning home would mean returning to her husband’s violence. According to her interview with the Telegraph, she and her husband David were forced to get married after an attempted abortion with a sterilized coat hanger didn’t work. She went through with the birth and had her son Kevin at 15 years old. Later, at 17, she gave birth to her daughter Debbie.
Arnold says she also had a “deep anger” with her husband’s violence, but that she “dealt with it.” She also alleged that her father would hit her while she was growing up.
“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,” the “Angel of the Morning” singer said.
Arnold tells the the outlet that she eventually left the Ikettes after Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger convinced her to move on. She also claims she became Jagger’s lover, even while his then-girlfriend and singer Marianne Faithfull was in the picture.
“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.”
In the memoir, the singer also discusses her relationship with Jimi Hendrix after moving to the United Kingdom, sleeping with Rod Stewart, making her way in the industry, 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, however, she ends on a hopeful note.
“Well I could do with one. What’s important is where I am right now,” she said. “How can I take all of these years of experience and just do something really great?”
The tell-all memoir is set to release on Thursday.
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