Joan's Tragic Secret — New Tell-All Reveals Rivers' MULTIPLE Suicide Attempts!
Nov. 1 2016, Updated 12:14 p.m. ET
Joan Rivers made the world laugh with her caustic wit, but a new tell-all book obtained by RadarOnline.com claims that she was secretly tortured by her tumultuous love life — and even attempted suicide TWICE over broken relationships!
Last Girl Before Freeway, by Vanity Fair author Leslie Bennetts, describes one early incident when Rivers's behavior almost landed her in the mental hospital.
According to Bennetts, Rivers threatened to jump out a window during a screaming fight with her boyfriend, actor Nick Clemente, who she dated in the late 1950s.
Alerted to her threats, her father Dr. Meyer Molinsky, "charged up to Joan's room and started trying to wrestle her back down the stairs as Joan clung to the railing in her bathrobe, screaming and crying hysterically," Bennetts writes.
"Dr Molinsky finally halted Joan's resistance by announcing that she had two choices : come home to Larchmont at once or he would commit her to Bellevue mental hospital that very night."
According to Bennetts, "The crisis left Joan feeling defeated; she saw her father as having won and his threat to have her committed to Bellevue as a powerful weapon that transformed him from a parent into a policeman. From then on, she tried to avoid him as much as possible."
Sadly, Bennetts claims, that was not the last time Rivers considered suicide before her death in 2014 after a surgery gone wrong.
In 1987, she was plunged into dark thoughts again when her second husband, Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide by overdose. And Bennetts says Rivers weighed taking a similar way out.
"She sat on the bed, the gun in her lap," writes Bennetts. "Everything seemed hopeless. 'What's the point,' she thought. She couldn't think of one…"
"'This is stupid,' she thought. And then her Yorkshire terrier jumped onto her lap and sat on the gun…" Bennetts continues. "A terrible thought occurred to her. If she killed herself, what would happen to Spike? …Rivers claimed that Spike saved her life when he sat on her gun."
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For more from Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Loves, Losses & Liberation of Joan Rivers, due out on November 15, stay with RadarOnline.com!
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