Soul singer P.P. Arnold is the author of the new memoir Soul Survivor: The Autobiography. In a new interview with The Telegraph, it’s revealed that Arnold alleges in her book that Ike Turner “trapped her in a room and raped her.” It’s not specified in the interview when the alleged assault occurred. “What can I say? It was awful,” Arnold told The Telegraph. “I despised Ike on that level, but I didn’t know how to express myself. I was told Tina [Turner] wanted to get rid of me because Ike was after me. If I had run to Tina or called my parents, it would have meant I would have [had] to come home.”
P.P. Arnold was a member of the Ikettes—the backup singers for the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. In 1967, she found success as a solo singer with her performance of “The First Cut Is the Deepest.” She released two studio albums in the late ’60s and had a career resurgence in 1984 when Andrew Lloyd Webber cast her in the original Starlight Express. In 2019, she released a collection of new material called The New Adventures Of…. Arnold’s new book, Soul Survivor: The Autobiography, is out in the United Kingdom this Thursday, July 7, via Nine Eight Books.
For decades, Tina Tuner has been vocal about the abuse she endured during her marriage to Ike Turner. (The singers were married between 1962 and 1978, and Ike Turner died in 2007 at the age of 76.) In her 2018 book My Love Story, Tina Turner wrote, “Sex with Ike had become an expression of hostility—a kind of rape—especially when it began or ended with a beating.”
If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual assault or domestic abuse, we encourage you to reach out for support:
RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline
http://www.rainn.org
1 800 656 HOPE (4673)
Crisis Text Line
http://www.facebook.com/crisistextline (chat support)
SMS: Text “HERE” to 741-741
The National Domestic Violence Hotline
http://thehotline.org
1-800-799-SAFE (7233)