Vanessa Feltz ex-husband branded her 'fat and hideous' during brutal divorce

The columnist was blindsided by her ex-husband's decision to end their marriage

Vanessa Feltz has revealed that her ex-husband branded her fat and hideous when he told her he wanted a divorce. The 62-year-old had been married to consultant orthopaedic surgeon Michael Kurer for 16-years at the time and the pair share two daughters.

But in her new book 'Vanessa Bears All' the TV personality shares the moment he told her that he wanted to end their marriage. She said: “I thought I was lucky to love a man who loved me back.

"I loved him very much and thought a whole life by his side would never be long enough.” The “Good Doctor”, as she refers to him in her book – father of her two daughters, Allegra and Saskia, then aged 13 and 10 – suddenly turned to her and spoke in what she remembers as a “staccato Dalek voice” when he broke the news to her in 1999.

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Vanessa told Express: “He said, ‘I do not rule out the possibility of a divorce’. I was crying, shaking, trying to hold his hand,” she says. Above all, she was asking him, “Why?”

He told her: “You are just so fat, so fat. It’s hideous. You are hideous. I keep waiting for you to get diabetes.” She said: "I couldn’t breathe properly. I could hardly see. This couldn’t be happening."

A few days later, Michael said he was prepared to give her a 12-week trial period. “I had to win the trial," she said. "I had to save my marriage, keep my daughters’ father in our family home to raise and nurture them. This wasn’t a challenge I could fail.”

Determined to become thin as fast as she could so her husband could see that “underneath the fat I have bones and features”, and would remember she was “pretty, and fall in love with me again”, Vanessa restricted her diet to apples and hard-boiled eggs, consuming fewer than 300 calories a day and training seven days a week.

But just six weeks into the project, her husband packed a suitcase and informing his bewildered young children that their parents no longer loved each other and that he was moving out. His dispassionate announcement left two little girls distraught.

She said: “I think that one can forgive on one’s own behalf. But I feel very differently about anyone who does anything to my children, especially the person who is meant to love them the most in the world.

“I can’t forgive anyone who causes my children pain, shock and grief, and thoroughly destabilises them.”

Vanessa's grandmother had introduced her husband after he treated her in hospital and they were engaged in 10 weeks. Vanessa - 22 at the time - remembers a swift romance that “reverberated against a backdrop of mortality” as she fell in love with the idea of being in love, and he battled the hordes in A&E.

“Quite a lot of it has to do with the upbringing,” she admits. “‘My God, how old are you? What,18? And you’re not married?’ And it really was like that. That’s not an exaggeration,” she recalls, shaking her head, as she recalls the emotional agenda that underscored her upbringing in a north London Jewish family, for whom marriage was the ultimate achievement. “If you’re brought up that way, it kind of sinks into your soul and your DNA.

“I wish I’d had a bit more self-esteem, to see whether this was a good idea, rather than just be so grateful to be chosen. I think everyone was just so relieved I was about to marry the nice Jewish doctor that my grandma chose.”

Three months later, she was expecting their first daughter, Allegra. “I felt very, very comfortable with someone criticising me and telling me I was trivial and superficial and silly,” she reveals upon reflection.

“I felt like ‘Yeah, that’s right. I am’. It’s what my mum and dad say. And you feel, ‘That’s right, you get me. You absolutely get that I’m so lacking in intellectual rigour, and lacking a whole lot of stuff, especially the ability to resist a packet of biscuits, and I will immediately fall in love with you’.

"And instead of thinking, ‘Wait, do I want to be with somebody who thinks I’m lacking; why don’t I find somebody who might think I’m fun and funny, vibrant and interesting?’, but I never felt I had the luxury of waiting.

“I felt that it was particularly urgent to get married and then to find another partner when my husband walked out on me. I would have got married the next morning if I could have found someone.”

In 2022, Vanessa’s second 16-year-long relationship with fiancé Ben Ofoedu – the Small of 1990s boy band Phats & Small, who is 10 years her junior – came to an abrupt end, and also amidst allegations of his unfaithful behaviour. She met the man she brands her “One Hit Wonder” after they collided over a chocolate fountain at the annual OK! Magazine Christmas party.

But by February 2023, plagued by rumours that he had cheated on her multiple times, and tipped off by her grown-up daughters that yet another woman had surfaced, she confronted him in a cab on the way home from dinner.

Spluttering with indignation and making little sense, Ofoedu didn’t attempt to stop her as she opened the door of the moving car and jumped out into the rain. She changed the locks that night and has not seen him since.

“It’s been a horrible, quite public break-up,” she says. "There has been no contact whatsoever since that day, the last day of the relationship, and yet every few weeks for the last 21 months he has seeped out of a drain somewhere and found something else to flog about me.

“I tried to take the high ground on it and not say anything at all, but it’s made me pretty miserable – especially as I had loved this person. And I think I had been a loving and kind, loyal, sort of decent, faithful, smiling, encouraging kind of partner. I don’t think I had done anything horrible to deserve a war of attrition to be waged against me for two years afterwards.” She adds ruefully: “I suppose you could say my entire love life has been a complete abomination, a catastrophe, an absolute car crash.”

Yet all Vanessa ever really wanted was to be one half of a decent, loving, long-term relationship. She says this ideal means more to her than anything.

“I would have chosen a lasting and loving marriage over a career as it was the most important thing to me,” she sighs. “I still think the same thing actually. I haven’t changed, especially having had children. How could you choose any career over your children and their security and family life? What in my career have I done that measures up to that? Career is not the main thing.”

Her relationship with Allegra, a solicitor, and child therapist Saskia, is a close and loving one, and Vanessa is a devoted grandmother to her four grandchildren – Zekey, Neroli, AJ and Cecily.

Pictures of their smiling faces adorn the walls of her north London home, but she still laments the connection that was snatched away when her husband walked out on his family 24 years ago.

“That joy I am never going to have, which is, going with your actual husband to visit your grandchildren and they’re both of your grandchildren and you’re together and you’re celebrating in exactly the same way the next generation of your mutual family.

“I’m never going to have that.”

Still wounded by her split from the “One Hit Wonder”, Vanessa has spent one single evening at home in the nights since. She even remembers the date: Sunday January 28, 2024. She cooked a salmon fillet in foil, watched television and had a bath. An experience she describes with a single withering word in her book: “Bearable.”

“I’ve been single for 21 months and counting,” she says. “It’s the longest I’ve ever been single since I was born. And it’s not my happy state at all.” She adds: “I can’t end on the ‘and then I lived happily ever after’ bit, because I’m not living happily ever after – with a partner, at any rate.”

“I do believe in love,” she added. “I hope that one day, Cupid will tap me on the shoulder, and I will find true love again. I would like to be able to say to a man, ‘I love you’. I really miss that.”

And she yearns for nothing more complicated than mutual attraction coupled with meaningful companionship. “I always feel I would love somebody who can actually read a reasonably taxing newspaper and say, ‘What do you think of this?’ Someone who’s interested in things and would like to go and see them, and would understand them when they got there.”

What she has learned from her recent serious relationship, however, is to avoid anyone keen to use her to swig free Champagne and get their photo into the newspapers.

“Some just want to grab your coattails and let you drag them up a red carpet,” she says dryly. “But I’m certainly not plunging in with any old renegade that happens to bowl along and say, ‘I like your eyes’ or something. I’ve really just about had enough of being somebody’s access-all-areas lanyard.”

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