British singer and actress Sinitta, 62, has shared a surprising new detail about her high-profile love affair with Simon Cowell, 66. The Toy Boy singer famously met the Britain’s Got Talent judge in the ’80s and started an intermittent relationship with him that reportedly lasted 20 years and eventually transitioned into a friendship. But on the forthcoming episode of I’m A Celebrity……Get Me Out of Here! South Africa, Sinitta has claimed their long-term on-off romance actually spanned four decades.
Sinitta tells her fellow campmates on tonight’s episode that she dated Simon “on and off for 40 years”, earning a stunned reaction from Gemma Collins who repeated the confession back to Sinitta as a question, clearly taken aback.
“I feel like Simon loves me and cares about me but it’s just…I think I romanticise everything. And then you see him with his partner and his baby, and it’s like, ‘Wow, okay.’ Like everyone really does have their proper person,” Sinitta says in a first look ahead of the episode airing on Friday night.
The singer then explains in the Bush Telegraph: “I genuinely believed that we were gonna get married. That was gonna be our happily ever after and then it wasn’t. So that was pretty hard. But then you start growing up quickly.” Sinitta claims she dated Simon on-and-off for 40 years, but Simon has been in a relationship with his fiancée Lauren Silverman, 48, since 2013 and shares an 11-year-old son, Eric, with her.
Meanwhile, Gemma says of the moment in her own confessional on tonight’s show: “She was in an on and off relationship with him for over 40 years and when Sinitta rings he replies and says, ‘I’ll call you tomorrow Sinitta’. I mean, if someone did that to me, they’d be blocked, scrubbed off the Christmas card list and yeah, I ain’t waiting around for no man to call me back.”
Sinitta and Simon timeline
The pair reportedly first met in a nightclub in the early ’80s. Simon went on to sign Sinitta to his label in 1983, starting a long-term relationship. During one of their splits in the ’80s, Sinitta dated actor Brad Pitt for around two years.
From 2002 to 2010, Sinitta was married to businessman Andy Willner and adopted two children in 2007: a daughter named Magdalena and a son named Zac. While her romance with Simon came to an end when he began a relationship with Lauren in 2013, they’ve remained close friends.
Sinitta was there to support Simon when he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2018, and joined both Simon and Lauren at Royal Ascot in 2021.
Sinitta’s role in Simon’s family
© Getty ImagesSimon first met his partner Lauren in 2004, but the pair didn’t start dating until nearly a decade later. When Simon phoned Sinitta in 2013 to share he was having a baby with Lauren, Sinitta told HELLO! she had been “completely and utterly stunned” at the news.
“I was in such a daze, to the point where I wondered if I was dreaming it. He sounded…odd, calm, strange, which threw me. I don’t mind admitting all sorts of emotions were running around inside me,” she continued. “He was very concerned about how I would take it, which, on reflection, he didn’t need to be. He didn’t owe me that consideration.”
Sinitta was named the godmother of Simon and Lauren’s son Eric, who was born in February 2014.
Simon and Lauren’s next step
Since welcoming their son, Simon and Lauren have built a life as a family of three in London, and got engaged in 2021. While they haven’t tied the knot yet, Lauren recently changed her surname from Silverman to Cowell, explaining to HELLO! that she and Simon had “both felt it was time”.
“We’re engaged, so the plan is that we’ll get married eventually, but changing the name wasn’t a big, dramatic thing. We both felt it was time; it’s really about the unit of our family. I just didn’t feel as though I wanted to keep my ex-husband’s last name any more. I would love to get married one day, but I’m not focused on that piece of paper.” Lauren was previously married to businessman Andrew Silverman from 2003 to 2013.
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