By now, we all know the painful story of Tina Turner’s sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her ex-husband and bandmate, Ike Turner. Now, another member of their hit-making soul group has a story to tell. P.P. Arnold, a singer, who performed with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue in 1965, reveals in her new memoir, Soul Survivor, that Ike Turner raped her.
In her book, Arnold writes that Ike Turner trapped her in a hotel room and sexually assaulted her. “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 years old, in an interview with the Telegraph. “I was told Tina wanted to get rid of me because Ike was after me. If I had run to Tina or called my parents, it would have meant I would have [had] to come home.”
Arnold said it was Mick Jagger who convinced her to leave Turner’s group in 1966. She stayed in London, where she went on to have a successful career, working with well-known artists, including Jagger, Rod Stewart and Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. Ike Turner died in his California home of a drug overdose in 2007.
But Arnold’s violent encounter with Ike Turner is not the only tea spilled in her book. The singer also reveals that she was involved in a brief affair with Mick Jagger and his girlfriend at the time, singer Marianne Faithfull. “Mick was in heaven but Marianne was more interested in me,” Arnold writes. “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.” Arnold says she eventually got pregnant by Jagger and that the two agreed she would have an abortion. According to the Telegraph, Jagger’s camp is not responding to Arnold’s claims.