Drug Hell Exposed! Prince's Ex-Wife Reveals Secret Overdose & Pill Popping Before Death
Mar. 28 2017, Updated 10:53 a.m. ET
Secret pill popping, emergency room visits and “loopy” behavior: Prince hid all this and more from his fans for more than 20 years before his tragic 2016 death, the music legend’s ex-wife, Mayte Garcia, reveals in her upcoming book The Most Beautiful: My Life With Prince.
Secret pill popping, emergency room visits and “loopy” behavior: Prince hid all this and more from his fans for more than 20 years before his tragic 2016 death, the music legend’s ex-wife, Mayte Garcia, reveals in her upcoming book The Most Beautiful: My Life With Prince.
Garcia, now 43, insists she never once saw her ex-husband take drugs other than vitamin B injections, but in hindsight, there were red flags. One day in 1994, she noticed he seemed “foggy” and “loopy.” “He sounded hollowed out and foggy, and that scared me a little. He didn’t get sick very often,” she writes. “And this felt different.”
“There were a few disturbing incidents that happened while we were together, and this is one of several occasions when he told me he was ‘sick’ or that he had a ‘migraine,” she recalls. “Looking back, I can see it was something else. I didn’t see it then. Maybe because I didn’t want to.”
Soon after Garcia discovered she was pregnant with the couple’s son Amiir in 1996, Prince was rushed to the hospital after suffering an overdose, she alleges. A security guard “found him passed out,” she remembers. “There was vomit on the floor.”
A doctor told her they had pumped his stomach and given him charcoal treatment. But Prince insisted he merely took aspirin with red wine.
“I had a migraine,” she claims he explained. “I took too many pills…It was a stupid mistake.”
Prince refused to discuss the incident for the remainder of their marriage. “I accepted his word that it would never happen again,” she says.
After the death of their newborn son later that year, the rock icon spiraled in grief. After he canceled two tour stops that December, she discovered “wine spilled on the rug in the hallway and vomit on the bathroom floor” in a hotel room, she said. “I knew he was struggling.”
Garcia claimed her Vicodin pills “kept disappearing” after she was prescribed the powerful painkiller for a C-section. “I assumed he was hiding them to keep me from hurting myself,” she writes. “In retrospect, I don’t know what to think.”
Toward the end of their marriage, Garcia found Prince “horribly sick to his stomach” and “on the verge of weeping” in Los Angeles. “He told me there were pills in the hotel room,” she says. “He wanted me to go back up there and flush them down the toilet.”
His “loopy and strange” behavior continued until she ended their marriage in 1999, ten years after they first met. She learned of Prince’s death on April 21, 2016 from his second ex-wife, Manuela Testolini. “I just remember both of us crying,” she says.
Two months later, the local medical examiner revealed he had overdosed on opioid fentanyl, a drug at least 25 times more powerful than heroin.