Tulisa Contostavlos might have been cleared of the charge of supplying drugs (to an undercover journalist) after the case collapsed (turns out the journalist might have lied at an earlier hearing) but, when she was first charged, there was a media frenzy. While paparazzi stalked the outside of her Hertfordshire mansion and front pages were plastered with her face and name, what we really wanted to know was what was going on inside. And now, thanks to Tulisa's new tell-all documentary, we can find out.
Tulisa: The Price Of Fame is on TV tonight, but teaser clips of it have been released to The Mirror ahead of its airing, and they're enough to make even the most hardened Tulisa hater feel some sympathy for her.
Filmed just as the charges were brought, she cries to the camera she's set up in her bathroom: 'So, here I am again' – a clear reference to the time she filmed her (very measured) response to her ex-boyfriend leaking a sex tape of her – then reveals how depressed she's feeling.
'I am so sick of people not knowing what is really going on. I act like I'm strong but I'm really not in the slightest. Part of me is strong, part of me thinks I will pick myself up and move on, but inside I am one of the most vulnerable people you ever meet, and I genuinely suffer from a lot of depression. And it's moments like this that send me under,' she says, 'I really just want it all to end. I don't want to be this person anymore, I don't want to be seen as this anymore.'
In a separate interview with Sky News**, done a lot more recently, she explains just how low she was feeling: 'When I found out I was being charged I lost all hope. I didn't have any fight left in me. I felt a little possessed. I don't know who that person was but she was very weak and in a very dark place.'
And it turns out, she did attempt suicide. She explains in the documentary that in December 2013, after hours of crying with cousin Dappy, she tried to take her life. 'I’d had a drink so everything felt even more intensified. I just picked up, like, 11 Co-codamol and just necked them with a bottle of vodka. I don’t even know what I was planning to do.'
Where it all went wrong? She claims it was the sex tape, as she talks about her time on* The X Factor.* 'The first year was a very happy time. I think it was the tape where it all went wrong for me mentally.'
If that's all making you very depressed, there are some lighter moments in the documentary, too. Such as where her lawyers, explaining to her that they'll explain that Mazher Mahmood (the Fake Sheikh who organised the drugs sting on Tulisa for* The Sun on Sunday*) used lots of 'carrots' to entice Tulisa into pleasing him. They list off the carrots – the £3.5m she was promised for a film role (Mahmood was posing as a film director keen on enlisting Tulisa in the cast), the promise of a potential Oscar – then, Tulisa jokes: 'Leo! A childhood crush… I did it all for Leo!' (it was promised by Mahmood that Leonardo DiCaprio would be in the film, too).
Luckily, Tulisa seems to have overcome the worst of it, despite being found guilty of assaulting a blogger at V Festival – a conviction she is set to appeal. She told *Sky News: *'I picked myself back up after it and I only continued to get stronger and stronger and stronger. And the person that you see in front of you today isn't that person who was in that very dark place six months ago.'
Tulisa also claimed again that Mahmood spiked her drink to get the drugs hook-up from her: 'Some of the stuff I'm coming out with is ridiculous. Being honest, I'm an X Factor judge. Like, really? Do people think I was running out in between breaks to the local street corners to go sell some drugs?'
Tulisa: The Price Of Fame airs tonight on BBC3 at 10pm
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.