My best friend and I both fell in love with Simon Cowell – it was so difficult but here’s what really happened
THEY say you should never fall for a close friend’s ex – but that’s exactly what Lauren Silverman did, according to Sinitta.
The Eighties pop star admits it was painful to see ex-partner Simon Cowell and her best pal Lauren become an item in 2013 after their romance became headline news.
But their decision to make Sinitta godmother to their son Eric, now eight, was a welcome olive branch that helped heal the singer’s heartache.
She says: “Lauren and I were best friends. It was a bit bumpy at the start, because of your best friend and the person you love [getting together] — that’s never going to be a good look.
“But we dealt with it, and I’m quite proud with how it’s all come up. They made me Eric’s godmother — and that was kind of part of our reconciliation and healing, truce and forgiveness, and unconditional love, because obviously it was difficult at the time.”
But, proving there are no hard feelings, Sinitta, 58 — who is an ordained minister at London’s Hillsong Church — will even offer to perform the upcoming wedding ceremony for the couple, who got engaged in December last year.
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‘I’m not completely content being alone’
She says: “I have been thinking about wedding presents for them, and I thought one of the presents could be that I could marry them because I am an ordained minister.
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’ I haven’t actually told Lauren and Simon yet, so I’ve no idea what they would think. But I thought it would be rude to at least not offer.”
Sinitta dated music industry boss Simon, 62, for two years until 1984, though the pair went on to enjoy a 20-year on/off relationship. Sinitta was also a guest judge on Simon’s hugely successful X Factor show.
Remaining close, Sinitta — adoptive mum to 16-year-old twins Zac and Magdalena – would join Simon on his annual jaunt to Barbados as part of his “harem” of exes, which is where she met Lauren.
At the time, the American socialite, 44, was married to businessman Andrew Silverman, with whom she shares son Adam, 16. Sinitta says: “Lauren and I met when our children used to go on holiday to Barbados — she’d be there with her family, and we’d be there.
Her son, Adam, and my children are six months apart in age, and so the kids used to play together, and we became really good friends. We were best friends.”
Time has been a healer for Sinitta, who insists she is now happy for the pair.
She says: “I think the public find it harder to accept than we do, but people need to realise that I’m not going to kill myself – I’m OK.
"I want Simon to be happy, and she’s the mother of his child so they are together, they live together and why shouldn’t they get married?”
Another famous man who Sinitta dated in her youth was Brad Pitt, now 58.
She disagrees with those who claim the Hollywood heart-throb has lost his sex appeal, after trolls took aim at his appearance on a recent cover of GQ magazine.
She says: “He’s super-hot. I mean he’s an older man, so he doesn’t look how he did in the Eighties when I was dating him, but he’s still gorgeous. And for a man his age, I think he’s in great shape.”
I’m not completely content being alone now, and I’m ready for someone to be in my life.
Sinitta
So would she date him again, given the chance? “Obviously,” she says. “It was a long time ago, so we were kids, but let’s put it this way — if I was somewhere and I met him, I would find him an attractive man.
“But we haven’t been in touch in years. We do have a lot in common. We both have adopted children and our children speak French.”
Sinitta, who split from celebrity agent Jason Gale in 2017 after three years together and was married to investment banking headhunter Andy Willner between 2002 and 2009, is ready to find love again.
She says: “I’m not completely content being alone now, and I’m ready for someone to be in my life.
"I’ve spent years going, ‘Oh my God — I’m single,’ because I was always one of those people who jumped from relationship to relationship to relationship.”
But it was on a recent holiday by herself that the star realised she had tired of the single life.
She says: “It’s really weird. You suddenly know when you’re ready to meet someone, because you think, ‘It would be nice to be here with someone’. Before it was the opposite — I enjoyed the total selfish freedom of being able to do what I wanted.
“If I wanted to eat in the hotel room or go to a restaurant or just lie there with the curtains open staring at the sea . . . Suddenly you think, ‘This is so beautiful, it would be nice to share it with someone’. I’m ready to share my life with someone.”
Sinitta rose to fame in the Eighties with a string of pop hits including So Macho, but she said she soon learnt that not every man she met had good intentions.
She says: “I’ve always had to take care of myself. I remember when Kylie [Minogue] and I were young and we were in a nightclub in England called Double Bass, that Steve Strange used to host.
‘It was a hard lesson to learn at that age’
“It was back in the late Eighties/early Nineties. We were in the ladies’ toilets, and there were two guys in a cubicle.
"I wondered what they were doing, but they were straight men because of the conversation, which was, ‘Which one do you want — Sinitta or Kylie?’
“It was such a shame because they were really hot models, and I thought the one who’d been talking to me had really liked me.
"It was quite shocking and it flipped something inside my head — it made me think, ‘I need to watch out for men like that who see me as a quest’.
“And it was a hard lesson to learn at that age, especially because you’re still finding your sexuality and seeing how the opposite sex view you.
"But it was also quite grounding, so I was very protective about who I jumped into bed with.”
These days, Sinitta admits she needs to date men that she might not have considered before. She says: “I’d always dated people in the industry or friends of friends, so this will be my first time dating complete strangers.
“I want to be more carefree when it comes to the dating scene, but I still don’t want to be used. I’ve never had that thing where I’ve just needed to have sex.
"I’m not judgmental about people who do, but I like to have an emotional connection with someone before I have sex with them.
“But even to have an emotional connection, you’ve still got to meet people — right?
"So that’s my big thing. How do you meet people when you’re famous and older and it not be somebody that you know?
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“I don’t want to date one of my friend’s ex-husbands. It’s a weird space for me at the moment, but I’m figuring it out.”
- Sinitta spoke to us to promote Debt Free London’s newly launched LGBT+ bespoke community hotline on 0800 808 5664. See .
