(Credits: YouTube Still / Alamy)
Blake Fielder-Civil, the ex-husband of the late Amy Winehouse, has opened up about their relationship in a rare interview and claimed they were phone-hacking victims.
Fielder-Civil was married to Winehouse between 2007 and 2009, during which they both suffered with serious drug addictions, as well as him serving a prison sentence.
Winehouse tragically died, aged just 27, in 2011, due to accidental alcohol poisoning.
Now, in a new interview on the We Need to Talk podcast, Fielder-Civil has opened up about her passing and remembered the moment when he was informed she had died while serving a prison sentence in HMP Leeds for burglary.
“My first thought was that it would be a hoax,” he recalled of his initial reaction. “I burst into tears. It was the only comfort I had at that moment for losing this massive, huge part of my life.”
Fielder-Civil also stated that Winehouse’s addiction problems had begun before they met and played down his role in accelerating her issues, stating, “Amy herself had agency, and that is in no way at all disrespecting her by saying that, but Amy did what she wanted to do, and even knowing the drinking had started to hurt her, she carried on.”
However, while Fielder-Civil said she had begun using cocaine prior to their relationship, he did admit to introducing her to heroin.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Fielder-Civil heaped praise both upon Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy and Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back to Black, which saw him portrayed by Jack O’Connell, stating that neither film made him out to be a “villain” like he was in the media during the 2000s.
This led him onto opening up about the media scrutiny and invasion of privacy that they faced, claiming, “We got our phones hacked. I got interviewed by the police years ago about having our phones tapped, which is crazy to me.”
Host Paul C Brunson brought up a previous podcast guest, Jamelia, who said that being phone-hacked made her insular and worried that friends or family were selling stories that Fielder-Civil said he could “completely emphasise with.”
He then stated that the press intrusion led to them becoming increasingly reliant on drugs, adding, “The fact that outside our window there were people trying to tear us down, as we saw it, made our bond stronger, add drugs into that and it did become to that daily addiction scale quite easily and quite quickly. And it was like, ‘This is our safety net’.”
The full interview is available to watch below.
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