On December 31, 1999, the last of the contracts he’d signed as Prince Rogers Nelson expired, so early in 2000, he announced that he would be called Prince again. Apparently, he felt that the unpronounceable symbol no longer suited him. I’m sure that was a relief for everyone who’d been bending over backward to insert that symbol in font collections and figure out what to call him and asking me what I called him, but I was sad to see it go. It meant something on a plane beyond words, beyond fame, beyond the ordinary—and that’s the plane where his soul recognized mine.
In all the years we were together, I never called him Prince. Now I did. I felt an era ending, and I knew our marriage was ending with it. He’d humiliated me, going around with Manuela and putting out a video of himself crawling up another woman’s cooch. He’d drained the money I was supposed to be using to maintain the house in Spain, so bill collectors were banging down the door. He made me feel banished—and not just banished by my husband, but banished by God. It was as if he expected me to simply disappear, and in a way, I did. I felt myself slipping down the drain and didn’t have the will to fight it anymore.
I woke up every morning in a fog of depression and spent the day pushing terrible thoughts out of my head. My love for this man had been the formative force of my entire adult life at that point. I was only twenty-six years old, but I felt like I’d lived ten lifetimes in the ten years I’d known him. I didn’t know how to be a grown-up woman without him, and I didn’t want to learn. No one had ever ignited my mind or body the way he had. No one had taken me to the heights he took me to, creatively, professionally, and emotionally. We’d given each other a child. We’d given each other the dream of children. We’d held each other in the darkest imaginable moments and in the brightest possible sun.
On March 20, 2000, I wrote him a letter and told him how enormously unhappy I was. Seeing the words on paper, I sobbed myself empty.
I have come to terms with the fact that you don’t love me anymore.
That was a lie I tried to tell myself. I hadn’t come to terms with the loss of him. I never really did. And I believed that on some level—even though it was a level now lost to him—he did love me and always would.
… what you really want is to have me out of your life without having to go through the legal system. Regardless of my feelings for you, I do not wish to be humiliated anymore…
I couldn’t bear to write down the word divorce.
What do you suggest we do in order to resolve this matter legally, in a way that is not damaging to us? I’m sure we can handle this quietly and expeditiously as adults instead of making a spectacle out of it.
I left my mansion in Spain and moved in with Jan and Myra, living out of a suitcase and sleeping on the couch in their one-bedroom apartment in Harlem. My attorney was a friend of Jan’s from Jersey. I’d come to Paisley Park ten years earlier with more than $100,000 in my belly dancing account. I was ready to leave with nothing. Jersey Lawyer told me I was crazy. When Prince’s high-powered attorney made an opening offer of settlement—I could keep the house in Spain, but I would get very little cash—Jersey tried to tell me, “That is a crap offer.”
“Tell them we’ll take it,” I said. “I just want to move on.”
I figured I could sell the house and live on that money while I took a moment to recover and start rebuilding my career, but it took years to find a buyer. When I finally got an offer I could live with, to sweeten the deal, I had to throw in a pink BMW my husband had given me as a wedding gift. By the time I unloaded that gorgeous albatross, the cost of maintaining the house and grounds had gobbled up every nickel of equity.
I’m not going to groan on and on about it, but I don’t want to underplay the effort it took to come back from this heartbreak. I was seriously depressed. I would never want Gia to think that a woman’s life is over if she loses her man, but that’s how I felt. I’d lost the love of my life, my son, my songs, my job, my band, my home, my home away from home—everything from Larry the Starfish to the “Children of the Sun” master, which, ironically enough, was owned by NPG Records, to whom I was apparently a slave.
But in that whole purple foo foo world, only one small thing truly mattered to me: Amiir’s ashes. It took me a long time to find out what had happened to the little urn with the dolphin family. I kept asking and badgering and getting no answer. Eventually, a compassionate friend told me that she’d heard about a troubling incident: Prince’s assistant was upset that he had been asked to burn everything in the house that reminded him of me or the baby, including the contents of the nursery—Amiir’s crib and toys and clothes and books—everything.
I stared at her, stammering in disbelief. “But—but surely, he—not everything.”
“It’s all gone,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
I sucked in a deep breath. My whole body felt taken over with rage. It felt hot and toxic and lasted for a long, long time.
In May 2000, less than sixty days after I wrote that letter to Prince, Daddy drove me to my lawyer’s office to sign the final papers. Jersey handed me a thick manila envelope and said, “You’re divorced.” Nothing but numb, I got into the car with Daddy, and we drove back to New York.