Vivienne Westwood has opened up about the emotional and physical abuse she faced from ex-partner Malcolm McLaren. Revealing details of the pair’s relationship in her upcoming memoir, she writes: “Because he’s dead, I don’t mind saying this: he behaved incredibly cruelly. Professionally, personally, in every way.”
“I used to hit Malcolm. One day he hit me back… He had this thing where he couldn’t leave the flat until he made me cry. He wanted to feel bad or something – he was trying to draw blood. It was simpler to give in; to give way to the tears so he would stop. Real tears have never come back for me. I haven’t cried properly since.”
Some even went further and said the Sex Pistols manager’s violence was not just restricted to Westwood. The couple had a son together, Joe Corré, who spoke about his relationship with his father being far from ideal.
“He was a horrible bully,” Corré says in the book. “It was archetypal, a textbook case of a dysfunctional, toxic thing – a sort of co-dependency where making her cry allowed him to feel whatever he needed to feel.”
Vivienne Westwood, by Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly will due for release 9th October.
