When we walked into the press conference, I had my game face on, hoping it would turn out like the press conference a few months earlier; when pressed to think about what truly mattered to him, he had admitted that our marriage made him a better man. My husband talked about his vision for NPG and how he was working to elevate and empower other artists. He gave his spiel about masters and slaves and not believing in contracts—something they’d heard before but knew the importance of—and then he announced that he and I were going to have our marriage annulled so we could renew our vows and “continue our marriage in a less traditional fashion.”
I felt my eyes go wide. I sat with a frozen smile on my face as the assembled press tried to climb over the language barrier to make some kind of sense of what he was saying. I willed him to look at me so he’d see the questions in my eyes: What are you saying? How do you expect me to sit here and listen to that?
I played Princess Mayte for the rest of the press conference, but in the car, I was hurt and furious. “Why would you do that to me? You made it sound like our marriage is a mistake—like it doesn’t mean anything!”
He went off on a long, alarming rant that lasted late into the night. Hour after hour, as I cried and argued and tried to reason with him, he quoted scripture and dragged me through the minutia of the Biblical teachings he’d been wallowing in. He wanted us to declare our marriage annulled and then renew our vows on our anniversary, February 14. He wanted us to be baptized the same day. He wanted me to sign a paper that said I agreed to all this, that our vows were annulled, and we were free from the chains of that contract.
Now, stay with me here, people: I refuse to be cynical about this. I don’t believe this was him trying to avoid divorcing me so he could get out of a financial settlement. I think this is proof that he loved me and didn’t want to lose me. I think he was struggling with the whole Manuela flirtation. She tells me now (and most days I believe her) that they still weren’t intimate until much later. She says they were friends. But I was familiar with the “friendship” choreography; it wasn’t so much a platonic buddy relationship as it was an elegant sort of tantric delayed gratification. In any case, it was well beyond the boundaries of okay for a married man. I think he was looking for something—anything—that would make him feel less guilty about betraying me, and the “annulment” concept allowed him to feel like he was still The One guy as opposed to the not the one guy.
I tried to read that stupid paper, my eyes blurry with tears and exhaustion. It wasn’t anything official or legally binding, but just on principle, I didn’t like the implication with regards to Amiir. Even if it meant nothing legally, it was saying that Amiir’s parents were never truly married. Frankly, I wouldn’t have fought him over money, but this? Now you’re messing with Mama Bear.
“What—are you saying he was born out of wedlock? Is that what you want to say about our son?”
“No! I want to say I love you, and you love me, and we don’t need this piece of paper telling us how to live. I want us to be baptized and renew our vows and be newly married in the eyes of God.”
“It’s your eyes I worry about. You can’t seem to keep them off Manuela.”
And so on and so on, hour after hour. The words coming out of his mouth seemed coached and contrived. I don’t know if he believed it any more than I did, but he bullied me until four o’clock in the morning. I was desperate to lie down and even more desperate to make him shut up and lie down with me. Eyes burning, ears ringing, I let him put the pen in my hand. Defeated, numb with weariness, I scribbled my name on the paper. He was calm then. Before we fell asleep, he talked again about renewing our vows with a baptism in February. Maybe we should do it right here at our beautiful house in Spain, he said. When I woke up, he was gone.
New Year’s Eve was the moment Prince fans had been anticipating for sixteen years: time to party like it’s 1999. I was with him in LA, and for a moment we let go of everything that had been going on. On New Year’s Day, he played the MGM Grand in Vegas for a couple of days, and then we all went back to Paisley Park.
Over the course of the following year, there was never any mention of the annulment or a renewal of our vows. He continued to refer to me, publicly and privately, as his wife. I kept flying to wherever I had to go to meet up with him for red carpet and press events, and he kept promising to take time off to be with me in Spain. I continued to wait and hope, traveling back and forth, from one continent to the other, from happiness and hope to disappointment and despair.