Tragic Tale: Inside Joni Mitchell's Secret Life Of Torment & Abuse
Folk rock icon Joni Mitchell endured an abusive affair with an insanely jealous drummer who beat the hell out of her and even tried to pimp her out to a superstar pal.
The 73-year-old "Both Sides Now" singer's brutal affair with legendary jazz drummer Don Alias comes to light in author David Yaffe's just-released bio, Joni, Reckless Daughter.
"Don was irrationally jealous and beat me," Mitchell confesses. "He thought I was cheating on him. He invented it. Probably because he was on the road all the time.
"He beat me up pretty badly."
After the first wicked walloping, "there was a big break," she says.
But the "Big Yellow Taxi" songbird returned to him after "he appealed to all my friends."
The second hammering came after she had a friendly dinner with her ex-lover, drummer John Guerin.
Don was seething with jealousy when she "came home, and he beat me up again."
Tragically, like many battered women, she stayed with Don — EVEN after he "pimped her out" to his idol, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.
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She realized she was in a jam when "Don, with all his jealousy, didn't stay to protect me. Miles was so coked out … I thought, 'Oh my God!' "
The horny horn-blower "lunged towards me on the couch … I jumped up. He flew off the couch with his hands around my ankle."
Luckily at that point, druggie Davis "passed out" and she escaped his clutches.
Joni finally left the violent creep after Don, who died in 2006, tried to beat her a THIRD time during a vacation on St. Martin — where she outran him on the beach!
"That's it!" she called out. "You're not gonna get me again. You can't control yourself and I can't be here."
Today, Joni suffers from Morgellons disease, a mysterious skin condition that some speculate is a hallucination.
But she insists it feels like "you're being bitten by fleas and lice. ... It was eating me alive."
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