Boxing legend Nigel Benn tried to kill himself after quitting the ring – before finding God and turning his life around.
The legendary British fighter, nicknamed the Dark Destroyer, said he was hopelessly addicted to sex and drugs in the late 1990s.
Benn – who won world titles at middleweight and super-middleweight – admitted cheating on his second wife Carolyne for 16 years.
He told a newspaper: “My addictions were drugs and women. I’m not going to hide behind fluffy words. I was weak.
“Carolyne was the love of my life, but I never showed her that love. As a husband and a father, I was a failure.
“I tried to commit suicide – but even that failed.
“Maybe the Lord was already looking out for me.
“Home life was difficult. When Carolyne took the kids to school, she could hear the other mothers whispering about my affairs. I wanted to change, but my addictions still controlled me.”
Benn, 56, came clean about “16 years of affairs and drugs” when the family moved to Majorca in 2004. He said: “Carolyne threw me out of the house.
“I lived with my pastor for a year, studying the word of God, trying to repair the damage I’d done.” The couple were eventually reconciled and emigrated to Australia.
But son Conor, 23 – now a successful welterweight – revealed the deep scars his father’s addictive behaviour left on the family.
He said: “You can imagine how I felt when I heard his con-fession to my mum.
“Telling her that, for 16 years, he’d been sleeping with other women. He’d been taking drugs. Lying to us. My image of Dad was torn down. Even if I had to sit in the same car as him, I would bawl my eyes out. I hated him.”
Benn was one of Britain’s most popular sportsmen in the 1990s. He defeated the fearsome Gerald McClellan in 1995 in a savage battle that left the US fighter permanently disabled.
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