When singer Tulisa Contostavlos was reminiscing about her career on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity this week she recalled how excited she had been when she was offered the chance to jet to Las Vegas to meet her co-stars for a forthcoming Bollywood project.
For three months, she had been in negotiations for a £3.5 million role which, she believed, would change her life.
Things had been going well: she’d made her name fronting hip-hop band N-Dubz, and, aged 23, had caught the eye of star-maker Simon Cowell who invited her to be a judge on X Factor for two series in 2011 and 2012, standing in for Cheryl Tweedy, during her ill-fated stint on the US version of the show.
Sweet, good-natured, while also sharp and eloquent, Tulisa had proved such a hit, Simon was desperate to sign her up for a third series.
But she couldn’t turn down this ‘once in a lifetime’ secret role which, she gushed to friends, she was ‘ecstatic’ about.
At the time, back in the summer of 2013, I would speak to Tulisa’s publicist at least once a week to ask whether she had decided to return to the X Factor.
Intriguingly, he would tell me that there was an ‘amazing project’ lined up for her and when he could tell me about it, he would.
Tulisa was flown to Los Angeles and Las Vegas and introduced to her co-stars in the penthouse of a five-star hotel. They spent weeks talking to her about the starry Bollywood names who would potentially appear alongside her in a big budget movie.
Singer Tulisa Contostavlos this week opened up to her campmates in the I'm A Celebrity Jungle about being set up by a journalist from the Sun on Sunday
Tulisa with fellow judges Gary Barlow, Nicole Scherzinger and Louis Walsh on ITV's The X Factor in 2012
She returned to London buzzing and checked into several executive rooms at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane. It was only a matter of days, she thought, before she’d be able to announce the ‘big deal’.
But as she told campmates in the Celebrity Jungle this week, ‘it was all a lie’. It was a sham – a set-up by The Sun On Sunday’s notorious ‘fake sheikh’ Mazher Mahmood – in a malicious sting to expose her as a would-be cocaine dealer.
She described how every time she had a meeting with one of the Bollywood producers, they’d tell her, ‘We need some drugs’.
‘After months and months, eventually they got a number and it was of someone that wasn’t even a drug dealer, it was an aspiring movie producer and I wanted to make a hook up as well for that person. The long story short is they ended up ordering £800 worth of cocaine from the number that I had given them.’
On July 13, 2013, the ‘big announcement’ the singer and her team had been so excited about came in the form of a front page story, with the headline: ‘Tulisa’s Cocaine Deal Shame’. Two days later, she was arrested for allegedly plotting to supply Class A drugs and went on trial – a case which was subsequently thrown out by a judge, after it was revealed Mazher had lied under oath and tampered with evidence.
The disgraced journalist was eventually charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice and jailed for 15 months. Although exonerated, there was no celebrating for Tulisa: her life and reputation was in tatters, and her fledging career as a reality TV judge was over.
Too embarrassed to leave her home, she shut herself away and changed her phone number.
A friend of the now 36-year-old star tells me: ‘Tulisa was devastated, what they did to her was so cruel. She felt like she had been set up. She now felt like she couldn’t trust anyone at all, even some of her closest friends.’
Strictly Come Dancing judge Oti Mabuse embraces Tulisa in the I'm A Celebrity jungle
Tulisa attends the MOBO awards in 2009 alongside her N-Dubz co-membersDino 'Dappy' Contostavlos andRichard 'Fazer' Rawson
Born to a Greek-Cypriot father and an Irish mother, Tulisa was, for many years, her mother’s carer.
In 2010, on BBC show Tulisa: My Mum and Me, she told how her mother, Anne Byrne, had suffered from a mental illness since before the singer was born. Some of her earliest experiences were seeing her mum forcibly sectioned into psychiatric care when she was five years old.
‘I was very unhappy, a very depressed child. It never went away fully until I got music. To me the honest truth was I didn’t know anything else – watching my mum go in and out of hospital, get ill, get better – it was normal for me.’
Her years out of the limelight were far from easy. She was beset by Bell’s palsy, a condition that causes temporary weakness or paralysis of the muscles in the face.
One friend of Tulisa’s tells me: ‘Nobody can imagine what Tulisa went through, one minute she had the world at her feet, the next she was facing four years in jail.
‘She couldn’t face the world for a long time, she thought nobody would want to touch her with a barge pole and she was right. It was heart-breaking to watch.’
She turned her back on London, her home city, and moved to Manchester – in the hope of a new start and, with cheaper house prices, a better standard of living.
I’m told her comeback was the brainwave of an ITV producer who recalled her popularity with young viewers while she was on the X Factor and thought that the story of her downfall would make her even more loved in the jungle.
‘Tulisa decided to put her big girl knickers on and get herself out there,’ said the friend. ‘She realised that whatever Bushtucker trials were thrown at her, nothing could be as bad as her life being torn apart in the way it was.
‘She decided to be brave, what could a few snakes and rats do to her that Mazher Mahmood didn’t?
‘She has grown in confidence and she realised that she could be a great campmate and decided to sign up,’ added the pal.
She has already proved to be an entertaining presence. On Tuesday, she revealed to Radio 1 DJ Dean McCullough that she describes herself as ‘demisexual’ [people who only feel sexual attraction to someone after they’ve formed an emotional bond] and that she hasn’t had a boyfriend for years.
Tulisa said: ‘I feel like I’m demisexual, I need to have a really close emotional bond with someone. I need actual depth. I’m a slow, slow burner, I’ve been celibate for over three years.’
Tulisa also told how being in a relationship makes her feel ‘physically sick’.
It comes after her ex-boyfriend, Justin Edwards, released a sex tape of her in 2012, when she was at the height of her fame.
‘It felt like virtual rape, that’s the only way I can describe the emotion,’ she told Olivia Attwood on her podcast So Wrong, It’s Right this month. ‘I felt so just judged and I felt disgusting, I felt ashamed.
‘It’s affected my relationships to this day and intimacy and all those kinds of things – it’s life changing in a big, big way.’
On Wednesday’s show, when opening up about the sting, she told Oti Mabuse: ‘I lost all my endorsements… my life fell apart.’
So is Tulisa’s jungle stint the beginning of a fresh start?
‘She’s ready to make a comeback,’ said a source close to her. ‘She has got some scores to settle and some points to prove.’
