Singer P.P. Arnold Alleges in New Memoir That Ike Turner Raped Her

Singer P.P. Arnold—who is is known for her solo career, as well as her work alongside acts like Peter Gabriel, Eric Clapton, the Small Faces, and the KLF—alleges in her new memoir, Soul Survivor, that Ike Turner raped her in the mid-1960s.

At the time, Arnold was part of the group backing Ike and Tina Turner, the Ikettes. The allegation was first revealed in a recent Telegraph profile, which reports that in her book, which comes out on Thursday, “Arnold unflinchingly recalls the time he trapped her in a room and raped her,” adding, “She’s kept it quiet until now.” Arnold said:

What can I say? It was awful. I despised Ike on that level, but I didn’t know how to express myself. I was told Tina 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.

Arnold’s book reportedly also details the abuse inflicted on her by her father as well as her first husband, David Arnold. She told the Telegraph that her book “is not a kiss-and-tell,” but it nonetheless reportedly describes relationships with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Rod Stewart. Of a three-way tryst with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, Arnold writes:

I tried to let myself go but I was also uncomfortable… ultimately it was Mick that I was infatuated with, not her. There was a plantation feel about it, like I was a plaything.

According to the Telegraph, after Arnold discovered she was pregnant following their encounter, “She and Jagger agreed she should have an abortion. Jagger sent flowers but didn’t cut short his holiday in Morocco.”

Ike Turner, an architect of rock and roll, was first accused of horrifying abuse by his ex-wife Tina Turner in her 1986 memoir I, Tina (upon which the 1993 movie What’s Love Got to Do With It was based). She wrote more about surviving his abuse in her 2018 book My Love Story. Notably, Tina referred to the hostile sex she had with Ike as “a kind of rape”:

“For me, though, sex with Ike had become an expression of hostility — a kind of rape — especially when it began or ended with a beating. What had been ugly and hateful between us before became worse with every snort of cocaine. He threw hot coffee in my face, giving me third-degree burns. He used my nose as a punching bag so many times that I could taste blood running down my throat when I sang. He broke my jaw. And I couldn’t remember what it was like not to have a black eye. The people closest to us saw what was happening, but they couldn’t stop him: any attempt to help me would make him more violent.”

In a 1993 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Ike Turner (who died in 2007), said that he was angry about his ex-wife’s book and the film adaptation of it, even though he hadn’t read or seen either. “From what I hear they’re both full of lies,” he told the paper. He claimed the “only time” he punched Tina was during their last fight, but admitted that he would “end up slapping her or something” after noticing “she was looking sad and wouldn’t tell me what was wrong with her” and witnessing “that attitude” play out onstage. He denied breaking Tina Turner’s jaw and said that, “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do anything any different. Except maybe for all the girlfriends.”