Vanessa Feltz has spoken about the moment she threw herself out of a moving taxi after finding out her fiancé of 16 years had cheated on her.
The TV star confronted her then partner, Ben Ofoedu, in the taxi about rumors that he was cheating after her own daughters, Saskia and Allegra, had previously told her the news.
And after he confessed, she said she opened the door and jumped out into the road. As the Mirror reports, the star insists she still believes in love with all her heart
“I’ve been single for 21 months and counting. It’s not my happy state,” Vanessa, 62, told the Mirror.
‘But I certainly won’t do business with some old renegade who comes along and says he likes my eyes. I’m not going to say, ‘Here’s my checkbook,’ ‘Come take a kidney, what do you want?’ “Please let me give you half of my house immediately.” I don’t do that anymore.
“I just don’t do that. I must have learned something from all this, right?, and I hope I have learned it anyway.”
Fair and honest, Vanessa has no time for fame seekers either: “My last relationship turned me off from dating someone who’s a wannabe,” she says.
“Some just want to grab the tails of your coat and make you drag them down the red carpet. And I’m actually almost fed up with being someone’s access rope to all areas.
Ahead of the release of her new memoir Vanessa Bares All, the TV star has clearly been reflecting on her past. And she can say with absolute certainty: she has been badly let down by almost every man in her life.
It was January 2023 and she had been at a West End restaurant for a family dinner when her then fiancé, ten years her junior, decided to call a taxi before she had even finished eating.
Her adult daughters, fed up with how he treated her, could no longer remain silent.
They were tipped off by an online troll that her fiancé was playing a game. And as he tried in vain to rush his fiancée away, it all came out of the blue.
Staggering and shaken, Vanessa got into the waiting taxi, absorbed the news and then confronted her boyfriend.
“He spluttered, stuttered and enunciated. I didn’t understand because he didn’t feel like it,” she reveals.
He eventually admitted to messaging another woman – which she later discovered had been going on for at least a year. And it wasn’t his first betrayal.
“I couldn’t stand it for another second. I couldn’t bear it,” she explains. “I opened the door of the moving taxi and jumped. My jacket was torn. Blood seeped from a cut in my arm. I assumed he would stop the taxi and follow it to see if I had survived the jump. He didn’t.”
Instead, he accidentally sent her a series of texts meant for the other woman, then posted Instagram photos of him partying at a club. She changed the locks that night and hasn’t seen him since.
Today is the first time she has spoken about what happened. Vanessa would understandably prefer never to say his name again. That’s why she calls him ‘One Hit Wonder’ (OHW), a reference to his 1999 hit. However, he has expressed disappointment with her.
“I tried to tone it down and not say anything at all, but it made me pretty miserable,” Vanessa says. “Mostly because I loved this person. And I think I would have been a loving and kind, loyal, quite decent, faithful, smiling, encouraging partner. I don’t think I did anything to deserve that.”
She could say the same about the way her first husband treated her.
She married orthopedic surgeon Michael Kurer in 1985, father of daughters – child therapist Saskia, now 35, and lawyer Allegra, now 38.
For 16 years, Vanessa thought they were blissfully happy. On a Sunday in September 1999, he blinded her.
“I was joking that I was broody,” she recalls. “Then out of nowhere he said in a Dalek-like voice: ‘I’m-not-ruling-out-the-possibility-of-a-divorce’.”
She asked the only question she could ask: “Why?”. His answer was chilling.
‘You’re just so fat, so fat. It’s horrible,’” Vanessa remembers him saying. “You’re horrible. I’m going to keep waiting until you get diabetes.”
The star, who was a normal size 18, went into shock.
“I couldn’t breathe properly. I could barely see,” she remembers.
A few days later, Michael scandalously offered her a twelve-week trial to save the marriage.
He never explained what criteria she would be ‘judged’ by. But given his earlier outburst, she decided to get as skinny as possible as quickly as possible. She survived on apples, hard-boiled eggs and less than 300 calories a day while training seven days a week.
“I had to win the trial,” Vanessa explains. “Saskia was 10 and Allegra was 14. This was not a challenge I could fail.”
Six weeks later, she had dropped at least a dress size, if not more. They went to her cousin’s wedding, she wore a beautiful black and white dress, they danced and talked. She thought maybe they would get over the dip.
But later that evening he suddenly jumped out of bed. He grabbed a suitcase, packed it there and then and left. It turned out he was having an affair.
The next day he returned to inform his stunned daughters that their parents no longer loved each other and that he was moving away. His cold, sober delivery left the girls distraught – something Vanessa can never forgive.
“I think you can forgive on your own behalf. But I think very differently about anyone who hurts my children,” she says fervently. “Especially the person who is meant to love the most. So I can’t feel like I can forgive.
“I don’t feel I can forgive anyone who does anything to cause my children pain, shock, grief and thoroughly destabilize them.”
It was Vanessa’s grandmother who introduced eligible doctor Michael to Vanessa – after meeting him when he treated her in hospital. Vanessa was 22 and had just graduated from Cambridge with a degree in English Literature. Growing up in a Jewish family in North London, she was taught that marriage was the ultimate achievement. Ten weeks later, she and the doctor were engaged.
Just a few hours after saying yes, her mother Valerie had booked the hors d’oeuvres for the wedding. Three months after that, Vanessa was expecting Allegra.
“I never felt like I had the luxury of waiting,” she explains. “I felt like everything was incredibly urgent and it was especially urgent to find a partner, get married and then have another partner when my husband walked out on me. I would have been married the next morning if I could have found someone!”
It was actually six years later when she met ‘OHW’ at the chocolate fountain at the OK! Christmas magazine. She should have seen the red flags there too.
First of all, he wanted to be her plus one for showbiz events, but that left him partying alone.
These days, she admits she hates spending time alone at home, even after her emergency surgery to remove a kidney stone last month.
It’s been 636 days since the breakup and she’s been gone every night except one.
Her one night in – Sunday, January 28, 2024 – involved a salmon fillet in foil, watching television and taking a bath. It’s an experience she writes off with one damning word: “Tolerable.”
“It’s not the house’s fault I didn’t want to be in it,” she writes in her memoir, which airs exclusively in the Mirror this weekend. “But weeks before my sixty-first birthday I suddenly found myself solo again and I couldn’t do it. The idea of hanging out all alone until I left for work the next day was too empty to think about. So I went outside.”
She’s had a lot of support from her close friends, including the ‘resilient, absolutely dedicated, tireless’ Myleene Klass (‘She’s my amazing celebrity friend from heaven’), Loose Women’s new single Linda Robson (‘She’s a great laugh and always on the tiles”), Rylan Clark (“he’s such a lark”), and the “sweet, sweet” Holly Willoughby (“one of the few people who is as beautiful on the inside as they are on the outside”).
Vanessa has also started dating – with mixed results.
“First, there was the ultra-Orthodox synagogue seven mornings a week, kosher to the hilt – a guy with an unexpected penchant for nightclubs who thought he was a killer for Al Pacino,” she reveals.
They enjoyed “drinking, dining and wriggling in the boudoir” for four months, despite him repeatedly asking her, “Am I the handsomest man in the room?” – without ever returning the compliment.
It ended with him bragging about meeting another woman at a wedding – with her boyfriend’s brother. When Vanessa questioned him, he admitted it but never apologized.
Other dates included an entrepreneur who tipped off the paparazzi, a real estate developer who showed her photos of his dead mother on their first date, an ex from 1974 who she realized was still “a pill,” and a ‘insufferably pompous legal beagle with a Roller and handsome driver’. She dumped the lawyer and had a date with the driver instead.
It’s a sitcom in the making. But Vanessa, a devoted grandmother of four, has sincere hopes that The One will come along soon. She claims that she is “genetically programmed to want a partner,” and admits that she cannot be truly happy alone.
“I really believe in love,” she says fervently. “I hope that one day Cupid will tap me on the shoulder and I will find true love again. I would like to say to a man: ‘I love you’. I really miss that.”
And despite all her ‘lavish’ career success, she would gladly trade it in for a happy relationship.
“I would have chosen a lasting and loving marriage over any career because that was the most important thing to me,” she confesses. “And actually I still think the same about it. Career is not the most important thing.”
Hopefully Mr Right will be around the corner soon. Don’t forget to hold on to those kidneys, Vanessa.
*Vanessa Bares All: Frank, Funny and Fearless, by Vanessa Feltz (Transworld, £22), out on October 24.