During his time as a judge on The X factor, Tulisa Contostavlos has developed a signature. At the start of each episode, the pop star raised her right arm across her chest and displayed three words written in italics on her forearm: The female boss. Over a decade of hindsight has given fans a new perspective on this tattoo. Yes, it was very cheesy, but it also turned out to be very appropriate.

The singer, who rose to fame as one third of the hip-hop group N-Dubz, enters the I’m a celebrity jungle this week already a survivor of sorts. At the age of 26, Tulisa said she felt like she had 60 years of life experience – much of which was not positive. The high points (or rather low points) are: a sinister leaked sex tape, a tabloid drug operation, and, of course, the good old misogyny and classism inherent in being a woman of the working class in the public eye. Eat a platter of raw fisheyes? It will be a piece of cake in comparison.

Growing up in a one-bedroom council flat in Camden, Tulisa said she was a “lost and unhappy young girl”. Her mother suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which put 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 her classmates; At home, she cared for her mother full-time. The situation was so distressing that she self-harmed to cope. When Tulisa was very young, she attempted suicide. “I couldn’t wait to escape my childhood,” she said The guardian last year. “I desperately wanted to become an adult, to live alone, to 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; his Irish mother was in an Andrews Sisters-style harmony group with her four sisters, and his Greek Cypriot father was, for a time, a keyboardist in the hit ’70s band Mungo Jerry. It was in her father’s studio that she first picked up the microphone at the age of four, before landing a starring role in a school production of Bugsy Malone.

Shortly after, she joined her cousin Dappy and their mutual friend Fazer to form N-Dubz. Tulisa wasn’t yet a teenager when Dappy’s father (her “Uncle B”) encouraged the trio to try it. He offered her £20 to join the boys. She offered him up to £50. Tulisa said she still carries a photo of her late uncle with her today. “It’s a reminder of where I came from and everything I’ve accomplished. That’s where it all started. »

Quickly, N-Dubz went from underground self-producers to mainstream stars. In 2007, they received the Mobo award for best newcomer and were signed by Polydor the same year. Their approach to grime was hypercommercial, a clever mix of R&B and hip-hop sold by their swagger and grandiloquence on camera.

In 2011, Tulisa won a then-coveted seat on the ITV show’s judging panel. The X factor alongside Gary Barlow, Louis Walsh and Kelly Rowland. Like her predecessor Cheryl Cole, Tulisa possessed an uncanny capacity for empathy – her own open-mindedness eliciting the same in others. She won her first season with the girl group Little Mix. Even though she was already famous with N-Dubz, her X factor the passage enormously increased the brightness of his projector. “I wasn’t prepared for this level of fame, and it was a huge shock,” she said in 2018.

This new attention has brought criticism – and scorn. Rarely did a headline break out about Tulisa without the word “chav” nearby. “Tulisa is very much a chav in a tracksuit as she heads to Tesco for some late night shopping,” observed the Daily Mailelsewhere calling her the “Queen of the Chavs” and the “Barbie of the Consulting Estate”. More at The Sunit was “X factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos shows off her “chav” fashion style – and at Mirror“Tulisa reveals chavvy tattoo in skimpy bikini.” Not that she X factor co-stars helped; in an infamous moment on live television, Barlow told a horrified Tulisa that she had “faggot ash breath”.

“The media openly called me a ‘chav’ from the day I received the X factor work,” she recalled in a previous interview. “I think the first line of an article the next morning went something like: ‘It’s 4 a.m. and in the back streets of Ibiza, a drunk chavvy girl, covered in tattoos and with big curls ears, staggers with a kebab in his hand.’ She turns around and ladies and gentlemen, it’s your new X factor judge.’ It’s like, so fuck it, what if I had a kebab and I had tattoos and I went to Ibiza? It would be nice if a classy girl did it, but as soon as it’s me, it becomes a problem. It was like they thought I had gotten too big for my boots.

Her ex-boyfriend seemed to think so too, then choosing to leak a sex tape they had filmed 10 years earlier. The fallout was as horrific as one might imagine: It was 2012, before MeToo, and Tulisa, a 23-year-old star from a working-class background, already had a target on her back. Memes were created and shared on what seemed like a never-ending nightmare loop. She posted a YouTube video in response, directly addressing the situation with a self-control and grace beyond her years – certainly beyond her time.

“When you share an intimate moment with someone you love, care about and trust, you never imagine for a minute that those images could at any moment be shared with the rest of the UK or the rest of the people in the world,” she explained at the time. Reflecting on the present moment since, it has been measured in the same way. “The release of the sex tape changed my life at the time, but it made me the person I am,” she said. The guardian in 2018. “I’m OK with that.”

Tulisa’s bad girl image was regularly used as a weapon against her – most catastrophically a year later by The sun on SundayIt was Mazher Mahmood who, after an elaborate and costly ruse that lasted months, alleged that she organized a drug deal for him. “It’s a shame for Tulisa’s cocaine deal,” was the headline in the 2013 newspapers which claimed to “denounce” the singer’s shady drug dealings. “Tulisa blows again,” reads another bawdy headline in reference to the sex tape – the dust of which was just beginning to settle.

Her friends abandoned her and 90 percent of her associates, Tulisa said. She lost weight and, at one point during the high-profile trial, weighed just 7 stone out of 11. Again she debated suicide. “I didn’t understand the issue enough to want to go that far, but I was getting there,” she said. The guardian. “The fact (the trial) went as far as it meant that for me there was a higher power out to get me.” Tulisa told the publication she attempted “something akin to” suicide. “It was my lowest point,” she says. “It wasn’t until three days later that I was back in training, ready to go to the studio.” Just as she had done as a child, she prayed constantly.

Once again, class played an important role. “You’d have to be blind not to notice that it’s a class issue,” Tulisa later said. “Just look at other celebrities and see the difference between how they treat them and how they treat me.” She pointed out the numerous photos of celebrities leaving nightclubs with cocaine on their nostrils. “It turns into this cool, chic thing,” she said. “Whereas I just have an association with it, and then it’s proven that I didn’t do it, and yet I’m completely dragged through the mud.” The story seemed to be the culmination of the same narrative that followed almost every story about Tulisa that appeared at that time.

In reality, however, the only drug she had ever used was weed. The following year, the case against Tulisa was spectacularly dismissed and Mahmood, aka the False Sheikh, was convicted of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

Tulisa published a book about her ordeal, which she began writing as soon as she found out she had been charged. “I had been blacklisted from everywhere, I couldn’t make music, I just had to get by. But I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing, so I thought I’d use this time to write, and even if I go to prison, I can still make money from a book,” he said. -she declared, describing the book as “.Sex in the city for a drug charge” (sic).

A redtop claims that Tulisa uses I’m a celebrity to relaunch his solo musical career, dormant since the release in 2012 of his only album The female boss. It featured “Young” – a dance-pop bop about mistakes made in one’s youth that worked its way to No. 1. But critically, the album was a failure. In 2022, after an 11-year hiatus, she rejoined N-Dubz for a reunion tour and a new album. Although received with nostalgic fanfare, it failed to perform commercially or critically. Tulisa once said she hoped to quit the game for good by age 40. “I’m looking to invest in real estate,” she said. The guardian. “I just want to live as peaceful and happy a life as possible, surrounded by peaceful and happy people who I love and who love me. That’s all I ask.

His personal life was not without difficulties; in 2020, he 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 “horrible” health problems separate from the disease – explaining in an interview that she felt a sensation similar to ants crawling on her face. Finally, last month, Tulisa revealed that one of the many doctors she had seen found “three chronically infected cysts” on her cheek, which would explain her pain.

In her free time, she enjoys watching reality TV and The Walking Dead. She also loves ancient history. “I could just sit down, open a bottle of wine and talk about the Sumerian tablets until the sun came up,” she said.

In recent years, I’m a celebrity has been used as a vehicle through which disgraced politicians attempt a sort of redemption arc: unsavory and undeserved. If anyone has the right to correct the narrative and show her “true self,” it’s Tulisa – a woman who stayed despite the odds. “I’m like a fucking cockroach,” she once joked. However, it wouldn’t have made as good a tattoo.