Emeka Ike’s ex-wife, Suzanne Emma, has opened up on why she divorced her husband.
The couple’s marriage ended in 2015 when Suzanne filed for divorce, citing claims of physical and verbal abuse throughout their relationship. In March 2017, a Customary Court in Lagos Island, South-west Nigeria, dissolved their 14-year-old marriage. The couple have four children together.
Suzanne, who has been silent since the messy divorce, spoke out in the media for the first time in a recent interview with media personality, Chude Jideonwo.
Her decision to clear the air about the controversies surrounding her marriage to the ace actor comes on the heels of the actor’s previous interview with Channels, wherein he claimed to have lost everything he owned due to accusations of domestic abuse.
The mother of four said she had woken up to the news of Emeka’s recent allegations in his recent interview.
She said, “I woke, and my sister sent me a message that he( Emeka) is at it again. Going into the message, it was the same for the past 10 years. So I decided that I needed to put an end to this because I felt like I ran out of an abusive relationship, but I am still under abuse. In the past 10 years, I have tried to move on with my life and build my life from scratch.”
“This person ( Emeka Ike) keeps going to the media space to bash and slander me. He cooks up lies and just says things that never existed or something he has built up. I just decided that it’s time to speak up. What I have been through is something I will never wish anyone, but I will never wish the devil himself.”
On 13 July 2015, she applied for a divorce at the Lagos Island Customary Court. The divorce proceedings were finalised in 2017 after a two-year-long feud.
In his previous interview, Emeka said he knelt in court to beg her not to leave their marriage during the messy divorce saga.
However, Suzanne said that the actor never knelt in court to beg; instead, she said that Emeka promised to do the right thing.
She said, “He never knelt in court; instead, he promised to come to my family and do the right thing, and they would adjourn the case for an out-of-court settlement. On the next adjourned date, we returned to court, and the court asked, ‘Did he come to me?’ I would say no. Because that never happened.
“In fact, in court, he had said, ‘Who wants you back?’ I had pointed that to the judge, who would say he heard him. So it was all a facade because he just wanted to look good and to stretch the court proceedings more than it should have been done.”
Suzanne also said that the actor’s friend did reach out to her, but it was not in court; she said, “Nobody knelt in court to beg me.”
Abusive marriage
Detailing the abuses she allegedly suffered in her marriage to the actor, she said that it started as verbal, mental and psychological abuse.
She said that her ex-husband didn’t allow her to work, and she suffered financial abuse.
Suzanne, narrating how she met Emeka, said, “I was just 18 years old, I had just finished secondary school, and I was a model. I also wanted to become an actor, so I became his friend. I wanted someone to put me into the industry, but he categorically told me I wouldn’t act because it would destroy our relationship. We had a relationship then, and he said he planned to marry me.
He said that Emeka stopped her modelling career when it peaked. According to her, she was gunning to contest for Miss Nigeria at the time, but her ex-husband deterred her.
Though they met when she was 18, Suzanne said they did not get married until she was 24; she was already pregnant with their second child.
She said she regretted the marriage because even at the wedding, the actor came late from another state where he was shooting a movie.
She said, “My parents never blessed us; the older sister’s husband had stood in, and the wine was exchanged on his behalf. All through the traditional marriage, when we had collected the list, and my family was preparing for the traditional marriage, I had called him. I asked him if his family was in tune with the marriage process, but they came in empty-handed. Even his family would always laugh at me at my back and say I married myself.”
She said she was an enslaved person for the family and marriage. She said that she started fighting back until she was 30 and accused the actor of beating her until she was almost paralysed.
She said, “He hit me in front of his PA Debola, in front of our kids, he beat me, and I could only see the stars; I said, ‘Emeka, If you hit me one more time, I will die’, but he kept me hitting me.
“He is denying it, and there are people I ran to in the middle of the night, people I ran to and I would collapse.”
She said that she had attempted suicide because of Emeka’s torture during the marriage. She noted that Emeka was verbally abusing her, and it was an emotional trauma.
She said she has pictures and evidence she presented to the court during the divorce proceedings. She said that the actor took custody of the child.
“You dared not speak to him when he was at it, and he would say, ‘I made you’, and I grateful, but that does not make you my God,” she said.
Denials
She denied the actor’s claim of building a house for her mother, stating that he only supported renovating her mother’s house.
She also claimed that the actor’s school was not worth N480 million as he had earlier purported. She said the initial worth of the school was N100 million.
She said that she left the school in the middle of October, and the school ran till the completion of the term.
Contrary to the actor’s claim that she shut down the school and left him with nothing, she explained that at the time, the family wasn’t financially buoyant and was thrown out of the house while the actor was away on a trip to America.
She said she was living with Emeka’s mum in Isolo and managing the school. The actor’s ex-wife also denied assaulting Emeka’s mother.
She said that Emeka requested that the entire marriage saga be kept under the carpet to avoid media attention.
She said that the actor had threatened to kill her on several occasions and had almost poured hot oil on her.
She said that her ex-husband had arrested her and her friends. “When my mother died, he arrested me. He accused me of running away with his SARS area F Ikeja properties.”
She accused the actor of being a drug addict who smokes marijuana. “We couldn’t make anything out of life because of his drug use. I didn’t know until my kids came back and told me that their dad takes drugs, meds.”
Suzanne also described her ex-husband as a sociopath; she said that her revelation about his menace in the marriage would be a shocker to him, and she awaits his feedback.
However, Emeka, featured in Toyin Abraham’s new movie, ‘Malaika,’ is married to South African model Yolanda Pfeiffer. The couple live in Germany.