During her time as a judge on The X Factor, Tulisa Contostavlos developed a signature move. At the beginning of every episode, the pop star would raise her right arm across her chest and show off three words inked in italics on her forearm: The Female Boss. More than a decade’s worth of hindsight has afforded fans a new perspective on that tattoo. Yes, it was very corny, but it turned out to also be very apt.
The singer, who rose to fame as one-third of the hip-hop group N-Dubz, is entering the I’m a Celeb jungle this week already a survivor of sorts. When she was 26, Tulisa said she felt as though she’d clocked 60 years of life experience – a good chunk of those not positive. The highlights (or lowlights rather) being: the lurid leaking of a sex tape, a drug sting operation by a tabloid, and of course, the good old-fashioned misogyny and classism inherent to being a working-class woman in the public eye. Eating a platter of raw fisheyes? It’ll be a cakewalk in comparison.
Growing up in a one-bedroom council flat in Camden, Tulisa has said she was a “lost and unhappy young girl”. Her mother suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, putting her in the position of having to be her own parent. (Her father left home when she was nine.) At school, Tulisa was bullied by classmates; at home, she was a full-time carer for her mum. The situation was so distressing she self-harmed as a way to cope. When Tulisa was very young, she attempted suicide. “I couldn’t wait to escape my childhood,” she told The Guardian last year. “I was desperate to become an adult, live by myself, be independent.” Religious from a young age, she prayed that music would be her way out.
Tulisa credits her parents with instilling in her an early love of music; her Irish mother was part of an Andrews Sisters-style harmonising group with her four sisters, and her Greek-Cypriot father was, for some time, a keyboardist in the successful Seventies band Mungo Jerry. It was in her dad’s studio that she first got on the mic at age four, later bagging a lead role in a school production of Bugsy Malone.
It wasn’t long after that she joined her cousin Dappy and their mutual friend Fazer to form N-Dubz. Tulisa was not yet in her teens when Dappy’s father (her “Uncle B”) encouraged the trio to have a proper go at it. He offered her £20 to join the boys. She got him up to £50. Tulisa has said she carries a photograph of her late uncle with her to this day. “It’s a reminder of where I’ve come from and everything I’ve achieved. It’s where it all began.”
Rapidly, N-Dubz went from underground self-releases to mainstream stars. In 2007, they were awarded the Mobo award for best newcomer and were signed by Polydor that same year. Their take on grime was hypercommercial, a gimmicky mix of R&B and hip-hop sold by their on-camera swagger and bombast.
In 2011, Tulisa won a then-coveted seat on the judging panel of ITV’s The X Factor alongside Gary Barlow, Louis Walsh, and Kelly Rowland. Like her predecessor Cheryl Cole, Tulisa possessed an uncanny ability for empathy – her own openness eliciting the same in others. She won her first season with the girl group Little Mix. Though she had already been famous with N-Dubz, her X Factor stint turned up the brightness on her spotlight immensely. “I wasn’t prepared for that level of celebrity, and it was a massive shock,” she said in 2018.
The new attention brought with it criticism – and contempt. Rarely did a headline run about Tulisa without the word “chav” in close proximity. “Tulisa really is a chav in a tracksuit as she goes to Tesco for late-night shopping,” observed the Daily Mail, elsewhere calling her “queen of the chavs” and “council estate Barbie”. Over at The Sun, it was “X Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos shows off her ‘chav’ fashion style” – and at the Mirror, “Tulisa reveals chavvy tattoo in skimpy bikini.” Not that her X Factor co-stars helped; in one infamous moment on live TV, Barlow told a horrified Tulisa that she had “fag-ash breath”.
“The media were openly calling me a ‘chav’ from the day I got the X Factor job,” she recalled in a past interview. “I think the opening line on an article the next morning was something like, ‘It’s 4am and down the backstreets of Ibiza, a drunken chavvy girl covered in tattoos with big hoop earrings is staggering with a kebab in her hand. She turns around and ladies and gentlemen, this is your new X Factor judge.’ It’s like, so f***ing what if I had a kebab and I’ve got tattoos and go to Ibiza? It would be alright if a posh girl did it, but as soon as it’s me, it becomes a problem. It was as if they thought I’d gotten too big for my boots.”
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Her ex-boyfriend seemed to think so, too, choosing then to leak a sex tape they had filmed 10 years earlier. The fallout was as horrific as you’d imagine: it was 2012, pre-MeToo, and Tulisa, a 23-year-old star from a working-class background, already had a target on her back. Memes were made and shared on what seemed to be an endless nightmarish loop. She released a YouTube video in response, directly addressing the situation with a self-possession and grace beyond her years – certainly beyond the times.
“When you share an intimate moment with someone that you love, you care about and you trust, you never imagine for one minute that that footage may at any point be shared with the rest of the UK or the rest of the people around the world,” she explained at the time. Reflecting on the moment since, she has been similarly measured. “The sex tape release was life-shattering at the time, but it’s made me the person I am,” she told The Guardian in 2018. “I’m OK with it.”
Tulisa’s bad girl image was routinely weaponised against her – most catastrophically one year later by The Sun on Sunday’s Mazher Mahmood who, after an elaborate, expensive, months-long ruse, alleged that she had fixed a drug deal for him. “Tulisa’s cocaine deal shame”, read the 2013 headline on a front-page splash that claimed to “expose” the singer’s shady drug dealings. “Tulisa blows it once again”, read another bawdy headline in reference to the sex tape – the dust from which was only just beginning to settle.
Her friends deserted her as well as 90 per cent of her associates, Tulisa said. She lost weight and at one point during the highly publicised trial weighed only 7 stone 11. Again, she debated suicide. “I hadn’t got my head around it enough to want to go that far, but I was getting there,” she told The Guardian. “The fact [the trial] had gone as far as it had meant, to me, there’s a higher power out to get me.” Tulisa told the publication she had attempted “something along the lines” of suicide. “That was my lowest,” she said. “It was only three days after that I was back in a training session, ready to go to the studio.” Just as she had done as a child, she prayed endlessly.
Again, class played a huge factor. “You’d have to be blind not to notice it’s a class thing,” Tulisa later said. “Just look at other celebrities out there and see the difference in how they treat them compared to how they treat me.” She pointed out the several pictures of celebrities falling out of nightclubs with cocaine dusted over their nostrils. “It gets spun into this ‘posh chick cool thing’,” she said. “Whereas I just have an association with it, and then it gets proved that I didn’t do it, and yet I get absolutely dragged through the mud.” The story felt like the culmination of the same narrative that had dogged almost every story about Tulisa that appeared during that time.
In reality, though, the only drug she had ever partaken in was weed. The following year, the case against Tulisa was dramatically thrown out and Mahmood aka the Fake Sheikh found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
Tulisa published a book about the ordeal, which she began writing as soon as she discovered she’d been charged. “I’d been blacklisted from everywhere, I couldn’t f***ing do music, I just had to ride it out. But I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing, so I thought I’ll use this time to write, and then even if I go to prison, I can still make money out of a book,” she said, describing the book as “Sex in the City on a drugs charge” [sic].
One redtop claims that Tulisa is using I’m a Celeb to relaunch her solo music career, which has been dormant since the 2012 release of her sole album The Female Boss. It featured “Young” – a dance-pop bop about making mistakes in your youth that made its way to No 1. Critically, though, the album was a failure. In 2022, following an 11-year hiatus, she rejoined N-Dubz for a reunion tour and new album. Though welcomed with nostalgic fanfare, it failed to perform commercially or critically. Tulisa once said that she hopes to be out of the game for good by the time she’s 40. “I’m looking to invest in property,” she told The Guardian. “I just want to live as peaceful and happy a life as possible, surrounded by peaceful, happy people who I love and who love me. That’s all I ask.”
Her personal life has not been without difficulties; in 2020, she was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, a temporary weakness or lack of movement that usually affects one side of the face. And for 12 years, she has experienced “horrific” health issues separate from the condition – explaining in an interview that she has felt a sensation akin to ants crawling across her face. Finally, last month, Tulisa revealed that one of the several doctors she saw had found “three chronically infected cysts” in her cheek that would explain her pain.
In her free time, she likes watching reality TV and The Walking Dead. She also loves ancient history. “I could just sit back, crack open a bottle of wine, and talk about Sumerian tablets until the sun comes up,” she said.
In recent years, I’m a Celeb has been used as a vehicle through which disgraced politicians attempt something of a redemption arc: unsavoury and undeserved. If anyone has a right to correct the narrative and show their “real self”, it’s Tulisa – a woman who has stuck around despite the odds. “I’m like a f***ing cockroach,” she once joked. That, though, wouldn’t have made as good a tattoo.
