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Cheryl Cole is opening up about her STD scare after finding out her husband, Ashley Cole cheated on her with several women in her new autobiography, Cheryl: My Story. Cole said she went to a medical clinic to make sure she had not contracted any diseases from her husband’s infidelities. “His infidelity had been putting me at risk for a long time — I had to put my mind at rest.”
I GOT off the plane from LA, put on big sunglasses and took a deep breath. I just wanted to get home as quickly as possible.
Mam was at the house when I got back, and she told me Ashley had left just a few hours before I arrived.I couldn’t face looking at our wedding pictures, and I turned them all to face the walls.
“Mam, by any chance do you have the stories?” I asked. I was jetlagged and felt dizzy, but I knew it was time. She brought them out, put them in a pile in front of me and left me alone.
As I started to read, I felt numb inside. I read them one after the other. There were four different women saying they had sex with Ashley.
One girl said they drank rosé wine in a hotel bedroom together, and that Ashley smoked. He does like rosé wine, and at first I told myself she could have seen him drinking it in the bar rather than sharing a bottle with him in the bedroom. The smoking, though?
He’s a footballer and this wasn’t something he did in public. Hardly anybody knew he smoked.There were other little details in the stories nobody could have known, nobody should have known, except me.
Holding hands in the bed. That hit a nerve, a big one. That was my husband that someone else was talking about. The description “like relationship sex” was so painful to read I blocked it out totally; I couldn’t deal with it.I pushed the papers away, feeling sick at the smell of the newsprint, and then I actually vomited.
I’d seen enough to know that the trust had completely gone out of our marriage, and I was doing the right thing divorcing Ashley.
He had hurt me so very badly. I sat alone for ages, thinking to myself: “I have no idea who my husband is any more. I don’t recognise him. The man I’ve just read about isn’t the man I married.”I spent the next few days moping round the house and crying. Ashley was trying to phone me all the time but I didn’t answer. It was agony. When I hit a really low point one night I phoned Ashley and begged him to talk to me, to give me an explanation.
“You know you said I did nothing wrong — well I don’t believe you,” I sobbed. “There must have been something. You have to tell me. It’s driving me mad.”
“Nothing,” he said. “You’ve done nothing wrong. It’s not you. There’s nothing like that.”
It was like talking to a brick wall. I would have preferred him to say: “You know what, Cheryl, I slept with them all and I loved it.”
That would have been less of a torture than not knowing the truth. When I put the phone down I sobbed hysterically, like a little child does, crying so hard I was gasping for air and wanting to be sick.
The house felt huge. It has six big bedrooms and I felt like a tiny, teeny person who might get lost inside it. I tried to get ready for bed but I got angry seeing our bedroom and thinking how Ashley had wrecked our life together.“How could you?” I screamed, kicking a pair of his shoes. “Why did you do it, Ashley? What did I do to deserve this?”
I started smoking 20 cigarettes a day when I normally only have one or two, and I was drinking too, just to try and relax. I was well aware I could fall into a dark depression again.
About a week after Ashley had left he came round to collect some of his stuff. I’d answered his calls a few times by now, and every time he’d told me he didn’t want our marriage to end.
He sounded torn apart, completely. I felt sorry for him, because despite what he’d done he was still a person I’d loved more deeply than I’d ever loved anyone before, and he was suffering. I gave him a cuddle. He squeezed me and clung to me like a little boy. There was no screaming and shouting.
He knew that divorcing him was not what I wanted, not really. But I couldn’t do it any more.
He didn’t stay long and was so tongue-tied we barely spoke. When he left I fell on the bed and howled into my pillow.
My marriage had died, and I was grieving for it. It was just the worst feeling in the world.
For two months I’d cried every day, sometimes hysterically, sometimes just shedding a tear when I made a cup of tea, and sometimes silently into my pillow all night long. I’d told Ashley I was filing for divorce. “OK. What about the house?” he asked.
I said: “Shove it up your a*se. I’m taking the dogs. I don’t want anything else.” I wanted as little to do with the process as possible.
I was being chased by the paparazzi everywhere — and I mean everywhere.
One day I went for a sexual health check, which was traumatic enough without having a pack of men pointing cameras at me and following me to the clinic.
I had to face the fact that Ashley’s infidelity had been putting me at risk for a long time, and I had to put my mind at rest.
I was given the all clear, but my emotional health was still in so much danger, having to deal with crap like that.
I just wanted to get out of the marriage and out of the house — but as the move got closer I became more and more emotional.
I hadn’t anticipated this. It was heartbreaking packing up my clothes
and still seeing some of Ashley’s in the wardrobe.Every room held a memory, and I didn’t realise it, but I think I was actually going through a nervous breakdown. Throughout the X Factor live shows I was cracking up.
On Christmas Day I cooked myself a ready-prepared turkey in a baking foil tray that I carved with a butter knife, as I had no kitchen utensils.
I ate it with some vegetables and it was quite nice actually.
Just as I finished eating it I got a text from Ashley’s mam.
“We miss you,” it said. I collapsed on the stairs and was sobbing so hysterically and was so out of control I couldn’t breathe.In the summer of 2011, a year after the split, I could feel myself starting to heal completely as a person. I decided to have a big party for my 28th birthday on 30 June.
I wanted all the people who were special to me to be there, even Ashley, his mam, and brother and sister-in-law. I still considered them part of my family, despite the divorce.
When Ashley arrived it didn’t feel awkward at all.
A lot of the evening is a blur, but I remember Ashley gave me a piggyback down the corridor and put me to bed in my apartment at the Sanderson Hotel in London, where the party was held. He even took my shoes off for me and tucked me in like a little girl, which he’d done a few times in the past.
Part of me would always love Ashley, I realised. I had loved him so much I couldn’t imagine a day when I would feel nothing for him.
The difference now was that I also knew that there was so much water under the bridge that I would drown if I ever went back to him.”
Via The Sun
