*Lionel Richie is speaking out about a painful chapter from 1988 when his first wife, Brenda Harvey-Richie, confronted him and his mistress Diane Alexander at Alexander’s Beverly Hills apartment.
“Shortly after I arrive, there is a knock at the door,” Richie recalled, per E! News. “When the door opens, Brenda is standing there. There is a massive confrontation. Diane is in total shock and I’m trying to leave, to draw Brenda away.” The encounter escalated into what Richie described as “the most awful screaming match of my life, and it’s all in this small entryway.”
The situation spiraled, with Richie struggling to defuse the tension. “The question is—How to stop it? How do you physically move a tragedy that is exploding in front of you?” he said. Although Richie and Harvey-Richie briefly left the scene, she returned to continue the argument, prompting neighbors to call the police. “The neighbors called the police,” Richie remembered. “Charges were brought and then dropped.”
According to The Los Angeles Times, Brenda Harvey-Richie was arrested on suspicion of corporal injury to a spouse, resisting arrest, and battery after Richie reported being “kicked in the stomach area” during the dispute.
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In his new memoir “Truly,” Lionel wrote, “The most painful part, the tragedy of our lives, was that Brenda was heartbroken. You never know what you are going to do or feel until you’re in the moment and it’s in your face.”
The confrontation marked a turning point for Richie and Harvey-Richie, who had adopted Nicole Richie together. “We all deserved a pass because we didn’t know what the story was going to be. It was just raw and ugly and disastrous,” the music icon explained.
The couple divorced in 1993 after 18 years of marriage, and Richie married Diane Alexander two years later. “That’s the saddest day in the life of a marriage,” he said of the ordeal. “When you know you may love each other, still, and you have a history that you will always have, but it’s over. And you know it.”
Richie’s marriage to Alexander, with whom he welcomed son Miles in 1994 and daughter Sofia in 1998, ended in 2004.
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