Chanelle Hayes - Baring My Heart

by Hayes, Chanelle

  I did understand where he was coming from because being in Big Brother makes you paranoid and you think everyone is out to use you and make a quick buck from you. So we agreed to forget about it and make a fresh start.

  ‘My friend’s got a hotel in Bayswater. Do you want to come and stay with me for a couple of weeks?’ he said.

  ‘OK, why not?’ I said.

  I was quite lonely on my own and at that stage I really did want to give things a go with him, so I got a bag of stuff together and went over there.

  For a while, things were really good. We became a proper couple and went out for lots of lovely dinners and on romantic mini-breaks. OK! magazine also took us to Dubai for another £100,000 shoot but that was a disaster, as I had food poisoning and was horribly sick for the whole five days we were there. I actually panicked that I was pregnant and so took a test – which, thankfully, was negative. There were loads of stories that we’d got engaged out there, which was just silly. There was never any talk of that. I was only 19 – far too young to think about getting married.

  Another time, I took him to Center Parcs and he came up to see my friends and family a lot. Although we did argue and had big scenes just like we’d had in Big Brother, we regularly told each other we loved each other and it was definitely not a sham. Not on my part anyway.

  After a few months, I started renting a plush apartment in Maida Vale, which cost me £4,500 per month, even though it was tiny. If you did a 360-degree turn in the kitchen, you could touch every appliance! But I loved it. The fixtures and fittings were gorgeous and it had beautiful high ceilings and a massive bedroom.

  Ziggy moved in with me for a bit but it was around that time that our arguments really started escalating. The biggest problem was that we both got really jealous of each other. We had our own friends and moved in different social circles and, when one would come back from a club really late, the other would automatically be suspicious and start flinging around wild accusations. More of a party animal than me, Ziggy went out almost every night and, of course, girls were throwing themselves at him wherever he went. I lost count of the number of screaming rows we had at 3am. Our poor neighbours.

  I guess the fiery side of our relationship did spill over into the bedroom. Our sex life was pretty full on and passionate, which made things exciting, but I didn’t think there was anything unusual in that at all – and I still don’t.

  We kept our rows behind closed doors though and we worked hard to maintain our image as a couple because that’s what people seemed to want. We’d learned the rules of the media quickly and I can’t deny that the relationship did wonders for my career.

  Having said all of that, there were genuine feelings there and Mum and Dad always welcomed him with open arms. It wasn’t quite the same story with his family though – they seemed to look down on me and I don’t think they thought I was good enough for Ziggy. There I was with my broad Yorkshire accent, like I’d popped straight out of Emmerdale, and they were living a very different, affluent life down south.

  It used to cause a lot of friction between us. One night I went out to a club in Soho and, by pure coincidence, Ziggy was there with his sister Zoe. It was really tense and, as I tried to have a conversation with him, she started shouting, ‘What are you doing with her after all that’s gone on?’ She stormed out of the club and Ziggy went after her – proving to me exactly where his loyalties lay.

  Things were very up and down but, that November, everything changed and he broke my heart in the worst way imaginable.

  With my birthday approaching, I’d been making plans for a big party back in Wakefield that Saturday night. I’d booked out a bar called Beluga and arranged hotel rooms for my friends and a lovely suite for Ziggy and me. Loads of my family and friends were coming.

  But on the Friday, as I was getting ready to go home, Ziggy said, ‘Oh, babe, I’ve got some family stuff to sort out today. I’m going to stay behind.’

  A bit disappointed, I said, ‘Oh, OK. When will you come up then?’

  ‘I’ll follow you up tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Well, don’t be late for my party, will you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he insisted. ‘Don’t worry – I’ll be there.’

  Next morning came and, when I hadn’t heard anything from him, I tried calling. No reply. I thought it was weird, especially as we hadn’t spoken on the Friday night either, which was rare for us. I tried calling and texting him all day long but could never get through and he didn’t reply to my texts. Eventually I rang my agent, Dave Read, in a bit of a state.

  ‘Dave, something’s going on. Ziggy’s not taking my calls and he’s ignoring my texts.’

  ‘Calm down, Chanelle, he’s probably hungover in bed,’ said Dave.

  ‘No, this isn’t like him. Something’s happened.’

  ‘All right, leave it with me, I’ll call you back,’ he said.

  Deep down, I was thinking that Ziggy had probably got with a girl the night before and was still with her. While hideous enough to imagine, what was really going on was a million times worse.

  ‘It’s bad news, Chanelle,’ Dave said when he called me back a little while later.

  ‘Oh my God. What is it? Has he cheated on me?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I’ve been trying to get hold of your mum and dad at home so they could break this to you but they haven’t been answering their phone.’

  ‘Never mind them, Dave. Tell me what the hell’s going on.’

  ‘OK, well there’s going to be a big story in the News of the World tomorrow.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘You don’t come out of it too well,’ he said. ‘It says you’re violent and have been beating Ziggy up and threatening to kill yourself.’

  I was speechless at this. I had no words at all.

  ‘And he’s broken up with you,’ Dave was saying. ‘So he won’t be coming to your party.’

  Jesus Christ. Ziggy had stitched me up royally. The newspaper had gone to Dave offering me a right of reply but there was nothing we could do to stop them publishing the story. It defied belief. Ziggy and I had been absolutely fine the last time we saw each other and there was no hint of something like this brewing. What an absolute bastard. In a total panic, I tried calling his agent, a woman called Claire I’d always got on all right with.

  ‘It’s Chanelle,’ I told her. ‘I need to speak to Ziggy urgently. What the hell has he been saying to the News of the World?’

  But Claire calmly replied, ‘Please don’t ever call this number again.’

  Then she hung up.

  It was so frightening. It seemed I had no choice but to wait it out and see what rubbish he’d come up with and, as you’d expect, I had the worst time at my party and felt sick all night. How could I let my hair down when the biggest newspaper in the country was about to print some mystery exposé on me that I had no control over? At midnight I went online on my Blackberry and saw exactly what he had to say about me. It was their front page story and Ziggy’s sad face was splashed next to this horrendous account of me being a psychopath who he thought was going to kill him! What the actual hell?

  It really was the biggest load of crap I’d ever read in my life. He said that I repeatedly and violently attacked him, leaving him with black eyes and cuts all over his body. ‘If we’d stayed together, she could have killed me,’ he told the paper.

  Not only that but he even said I frequently ordered him to beat me up in bed. He claimed:

  Chanelle loves aggressive sex. Guys have knocked her around in bed but I’m not into that. I walked away from sex sessions battered and bruised.

  My back would be ripped to pieces by her scratching. One night we were in the middle of sex and she said, ‘Hit me in the face.’ I refused. I would never hit any woman, let alone while having sex with her.

  I could not take any of it in. It was like he was ripping my heart out of my chest with both hands. And you only have to look at the difference in our sizes to s
ee that was crazy; he’s a 6ft, strapping guy and I was a tiny size 8 who weighed less than 8st. As if I could beat him up or make him believe I’d kill him. I’d been to a few boxing classes prior to that and my trainer was in stitches laughing for 10 minutes because I was so pathetically weak and feeble.

  Yes, I threw stuff around in the flat when we argued and I did try to shove him in the heat of a row. I also admit I slapped him round the face once or twice – but that doesn’t mean I was capable of killing him.

  As for things in the bedroom, yes, our sex life was uninhibited but plenty of people are like that. It doesn’t make you a psychopathic would-be murderer, does it? I also bruise very easily so, if things had been as aggressive as he said, I’d have been walking around black and blue, wouldn’t I?

  He also said I’d threatened to take an overdose after we fought but that was just him manipulating the past because he knew about my previous experiences and used it to his advantage. That was so underhand and nasty.

  The most laughable bit though was his claim that, if he wanted to talk to me, I’d pass him onto my PA to arrange a time for us to speak. What a load of utter bollocks! I’m from Wakefield, I’m not the Queen – I didn’t need anyone to answer my phone. It was permanently glued to my hand in those days.

  The next day, all my friends came round to Mum and Dad’s for a prearranged champagne breakfast but I just sat against the radiator in the living room, crying inconsolably all day long. Nobody knew what to say.

  How could he betray me like this? I was so confused. He was supposed to have cared about me. I knew we had big arguments and I had tantrums but you don’t do this sort of thing to someone you’ve ever had feelings for. Not in a million years. If I’d known he needed cash so badly, I’d have bloody written him out a big cheque myself.

  I tried calling him on his mobile but he’d changed his number by this time. And Dave couldn’t offer me a shred of comfort.

  ‘I want to sue the paper,’ I told him.

  ‘You can’t do that, Chanelle. The News of the World is the most powerful newspaper in Britain. Do you really think you can afford to take them to court over this? Don’t be silly.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do then? I can’t believe I’ve been so vilified – it’s completely unfair.’

  ‘You’ve just got to ride it out,’ he said. ‘It’ll blow over. Tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper and all that.’

  As it happened, Dave did arrange for me to tell my side of the story to another newspaper and magazine but what could I really say to stop the damage to my reputation? It had already been done as far as I was concerned.

  For the next few days, I was so depressed I couldn’t even go out of the house and I lay around in my pyjamas full of despair. Mum and Dad were understandably devastated too, as Ziggy’s actions had also heaped shame on them.

  Unsurprisingly, I never heard from him after all of that. Not a whisper. And it wasn’t until a couple of years later that our paths crossed again. We were both in Marbella with groups of friends and, when I saw him, my stomach lurched – not in a good way. Seeing him brought back such awful memories and, though I had nothing to say to him, he came over to speak to me.

  ‘Hi, stranger,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you in a while.’

  I felt like it was some sort of piss-take and that I was being filmed for Punk’d.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ I said, as nonchalantly as I could.

  ‘I just wanted to come over and clear the air,’ he said. ‘Things got really twisted in that interview and they made out it was much worse than it was. I was really mad about how they made you look.’

  I was not in the mood for this. ‘Don’t bother,’ I told him. ‘I know you got more than £100,000 for that interview, so of course you had to say certain stuff.’

  He looked at me gratefully but I wasn’t finished yet.

  ‘If you want to be a man and apologise, fine but don’t lie to my face because I’m not stupid.’

  He held his hands up and said, ‘OK, I know. I’m sorry. I was young and foolish and I was getting bad advice and hanging around with the wrong crowd.’

  That fleeting little apology could never undo what he did. Nothing could.

  ‘Well, I’d like to get on with my holiday now,’ I said, walking away. ‘See you later.’

  I just couldn’t be bothered to waste my evening talking to a drip like that all night. And he still hadn’t cut his ridiculous hair!

  You might imagine that was the last I ever heard from him but, some time later, I got a text from him, which said, ‘Hi, it’s Zach ‘Ziggy’ Lichman.’ Like I’d ever forget that name.

  ‘I was just saying hi, I wanted to see how you were,’ he wrote. ‘You’re looking amazing at the moment.’

  I could only assume that his money had dried up and he was trying his luck.

  ‘Your career’s going really well too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, things are going well,’ I said, trying to make light of it. ‘You actually did me a real favour selling that story.’

  Then he asked if I was planning any trips to London and if he could take me out for dinner if I came down. Who the hell was he kidding?

  ‘No, I don’t really fancy that,’ I texted back.

  ‘Oh. Why not?’

  ‘I’m just not interested.’

  ‘Come on, just as friends having a catch-up.’

  ‘But we’re not friends, are we?’ I said. ‘We’ve got nothing in common.’

  His ego was really that big that he thought I might consider seeing him again. The gall of the man was astonishing. In the end, I told him not to contact me again. This was one can of worms I really didn’t want to open.

  Still, Ziggy wasn’t the only guy to ‘kiss ’n’ tell’ on me. While I was in Big Brother, my old flame Spencer decided to tell a rather different version of my abortion drama, saying we’d been through a miscarriage together and that he’d loyally held my hand all the while I’d been in hospital.

  When I read that, I was like, ‘Wow. Just wow.’ I confronted him and he said, ‘I only did it because I didn’t want you to look bad for having an abortion.’

  To be fair, part of me understood his logic, as many people have very strong anti-abortion opinions. But to say he was right there with me, dabbing my face with water and stroking my hair as we lost our child, was so insensitive. How could he say all that when he’d put me through hell?

  In the interview, he also said that we’d been together when I went into Big Brother and that he now wanted to beat Ziggy up. This was the final straw for me and I wrote him a letter, which I posted through his door. It said something like, ‘I think what you’ve done is disgusting. I’m really upset that you’ve made yourself out to be such a nice person when, in reality, you almost ruined my life. You can’t muck about with these issues, especially when someone’s life has already been so messed up.’

  After he read it, he dashed round to our house. I wasn’t there but he told Mum, ‘Christine, I’m so sorry – I never meant to put her through that. I was young, I didn’t realise what she was dealing with. I just want to do the right thing now.’

  In all honesty, I don’t think he’s a nasty person; he just wasn’t ready to be a dad and, in blind panic, tried everything he could to stop the situation going any further. I’ve seen him a few times since and he’s helped me out with a couple of odd jobs at home. He probably still feels guilty, so I’m sure he’ll always help me out in future if I need him. Perhaps I almost sound a bit too forgiving of Spencer but I guess it’s easier that way than to hold a life-long grudge. Life’s too short for so many enemies, isn’t it?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Dark Side

  The post-Big Brother whirlwind continued and a steady stream of work came my way – including loads of raunchy glamour shoots. People have often asked me how I feel about doing them and I often get accused of being a slag for stripping off. But it’s a job like any other, isn’t it? And it happens to be one that pays very we
ll, so I’ve never been ashamed of it. If my body helps sell magazines, who is anyone to judge that?

  I was obviously a bit nervous about what Mum and Dad would think in the early days, especially about some of the ‘girl-on-girl’ type pictures, but they’re shrewd enough to know why I’m doing it. They’ve also kept every publication I’ve ever been in so, if their house ever burns down, about £10,000-worth of magazines will go down with it! And I think Dad genuinely feels proud that his daughter is a model and loves hearing compliments about me – even if it is in relation to me having my boobs out!

  In November 2007 I filmed a reality-TV show for VH1 music channel, which was called Wannabe (what else?). The presenter, Toby Anstis, and I had to find a new girl group similar to the Spice Girls and it was a sort of downmarket X Factor. But sadly, the band we created failed to achieve quite the level of world domination of Posh and her girls. You win some, you lose some, I guess.

  Soon after, I got my beloved dog Crumpet, a ginger Pomeranian who I just adored. She was a little cheer-up present to myself after I had my fingers burned by a footballer called Seb Hines, who played for Middlesbrough.

  He’d got my number from a club promoter I knew and, after we’d been out a couple of times, the newspapers cottoned on to it. Nothing had happened between us – we’d only been to the cinema and for a bite to eat but the next minute there was this big story in the News of the World, saying he had a kid and a girlfriend who was pregnant with their second child!

  What on earth had I got myself caught up in? As far as I was aware, Seb was totally single and he’d never mentioned a child at all.

  I called him up in a state and said, ‘What the hell is this about? Have you got a girlfriend?’

  ‘Er, yeah but we’re in the process of breaking up,’ he said lamely.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Seb, this is not on. Please can you tell her that I never knew about this?’

  After that, I wanted nothing more to do with him. I’d thought he was a bit of a drip anyway and we didn’t have much in common, so I called it all off before it got any messier.