RUGBY star Danny Cipriani has revealed in a bombshell book how Kelly Brook cheated on boyfriend Thom Evans by going on a secret romantic holiday with him.
The England ace admits he was “devastated” over the relationship between his ex Kelly and his former Wasps team-mate and set out to meet her behind his pal’s back.
Danny told The Sun on Sunday: “I felt like it was fair game . . . I felt like what was mine wasn’t mine any more. I was friends with Thom. It was definitely a difficult scenario.”
In the book he writes: “We secretly meet up in Mauritius, while she’s still meant to be with Thom.”
In a frank interview ahead of his autobiography’s release, the wild-living fly-half also reveals he once “needed women like an alcoholic needs booze” — and recalls the day he tried to buy a gun off a gangster to kill himself.
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The pair secretly got together in Mauritius while Kelly was still dating Thom — even though Danny knew “deep down it’s wrong”.
He said: “I was friends with Thom.
"It was definitely a difficult scenario — it’s like seeing your mate and your ex-girlfriend all over Facebook, but yet it’s a national newspaper. The whole thing was intense.
“I was away in Australia, and Kelly was still messaging me. And I was so confused and torn and twisted at that time.”
Danny had dated Kelly from August 2008 to June 2010, but she got together with Thom that November, leaving him feeling as if his “heart is being broken in glorious technicolour”.
But the wild-living star admits when they reunited he didn’t even want his winning “prize” of Kelly — who was once dubbed the sexiest woman in the world.
In an exclusive interview with The Sun on Sunday, Danny admits the “fantasy” didn’t live up to the reality and says: “Ultimately, when we got back together, I realised very quickly that it wasn’t what I wanted.
“When you love someone, when you’re with your soulmate, it’s difficult. It’s challenging.
“I didn’t have that type of relationship with Kelly. And it just wasn’t love . . . for me.”
Speaking out ahead of his new autobiography, Danny reveals details of their troubled relationship for the first time, telling how:
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- KELLY once had to be restrained by club bouncers after finding out he was trying to cheat on her;
- HE then felt so remorseful he rushed to the toilet and tried to slash his own wrists. and;
- SHE finally dumped him after finding X-rated messages from scores of women on his phone.
In his new warts-and-all autobiography Who Am I?, Danny documents his rollercoaster journey from boy wonder and the “saviour of English rugby” to a player viewed by sport insiders as “sub-human scum”.
He was 19 when he joined Wasps as a gifted fly-half in 2007. Just months later he was in the England squad.
But the rugby union player’s fame reached a new level in 2008 when he fell for Kelly, now 43.
Danny dated Kelly for nearly two years until June 2010.
But by November she had started dating Scottish rugby player Thom, who had been Danny’s teammate at London Wasps for two years until 2006.
As Danny watched Kelly and Thom’s romance from Australia, where he was working after signing for the Melbourne Rebels, he was full of jealousy — and set out to win her back.
Danny says: “I felt like it was fair game . . . I look back and a lot of it was ego-driven. I felt like what was mine wasn’t mine any more.”
When Thom, now 38, and Kelly announced her pregnancy in March 2011 he was “devastated”.
But after they lost the baby later that year, Danny sets out in his book how he and heartbroken Kelly secretly met in Mauritius.
He writes: “When she loses the baby, we secretly meet up in Mauritius, while she’s still meant to be with Thom. I know deep down it’s wrong, but I’m convinced I want her back.”
While the reunion was tinged with excitement, he soon realised the relationship wasn’t meant to be.
He said: “I thought I got what I wanted. So you get the prize of what you wanted but that’s just ego again.”
Danny also reveals how their stormy relationship unravelled spectacularly for the first time when they went on holiday to Las Vegas in the summer of 2010 — and Kelly encouraged him to enjoy a lap dance in a strip club.
He admits: “It all started because I was very p***ed. I was having a dance and it felt like she (the stripper) was doing a bit more than a dance.
"I started chatting some cheesy lyrics to her.”
Danny told the stripper he was breaking up with Kelly and would be back in the American gambling city the following week — which she relayed to pals in the toilets, all in front of his horrified girlfriend.
He says: “Kelly came out and slapped me around the face.”
Kelly had to be restrained by several bouncers, as limbs flailed.
He adds: “It all felt like some massive crazy reality show.”
Back at the hotel Danny went into the bathroom and grabbed a piece of broken glass.
Miming raking it down the length of his arm, he says: “I just went through myself like that.
“I felt like I just . . . I couldn’t express how I felt because I had so much within that I hadn’t dealt with. So that’s what I felt the route to take was.”
In his book, Danny writes: “I head to the toilet and take a piece of broken glass to my wrist. I’m not intending to end it all, I just desperately want to feel something.”
While he admits his actions were “wrong”, he says Kelly was constantly running “hot and cold.”
He adds: “Me and Kelly were in a position where she kept trying to break up with me, and I felt like she was pushing and pulling away from me all the time.
“And that up and down feeling made me feel a bit like, ‘F** it, if that’s the case’.
“I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do, but that’s how I felt.”
He claims living with the pin-up was not as much fun as you’d think because Kelly didn’t do “deep and meaningfuls”.
He says: “I guess I was always at some point seeking and searching in a different way.”
The Mauritius liaison came before Kelly and Thom — who is now engaged to Nicole Scherzinger — split.
But when it became public in January 2013, she denied speculation that Danny was involved.
Kelly said: “Thom and I mutually agreed to go our separate ways some time ago. It had absolutely nothing to do with a third party.”
A month later, she was back out in public with Danny and by April calling him her “boyfriend” again.
It was short-lived after she found X-rated messages from scores of other women on his mobile.
He shrugs and says: “She went through my phone and saw lots of messages she probably didn’t enjoy reading. She just caught me red-handed.”
Unsurprisingly, Kelly took aim at Danny in her own autobiography in 2014, saying that he was so busy chasing women he could not find time to flush the loo.
Asked about the claim, he laughs: “I guess I was a young boy and maybe I didn’t flush the toilet once.
“I don’t know what to say to that. I haven’t read books like that. I read books that challenge my mind and my views and concepts of life.
"If that’s what she wants to write in a book, then that’s cool. And I flush the toilet now.”
In his sexual prime, Danny had a “squad” of women who he would rotate like “counters in a game”.
He admits it wasn’t unusual to sleep with more than three women in a day, “shuffling one girl out of the house just in time for the next one to turn up”.
His conquests included “everyone from porn stars to actresses to girls I meet at the coffee shop.”
At one point, Danny would sleep with married women because, as he tells me, “it just felt safer because they couldn’t tell anyone”.
Despite admitting he once “needed women like an alcoholic needs booze”, Danny is keen not to label himself as a sex addict.
He says: “I was once a guy that had sex with so many women, I was pushing the boundary, and I was trying to find a way to have sex with this person and that person, threesomes and whatever, whatever. But none of that stemmed from a place of love.
“I was able to share a lot of love, but I wasn’t emotionally available in the same breath which made me alluring to women, I’m sure of it.
"It was crazy . . . I felt like my life was just constant chaos.”
While he admits his sexual antics may sound “fun” from the outside, in reality Danny says he was operating from a “place of pain” which triggered his childhood feelings of abandonment.
His parents Jay and Anne split when he was two, and eight years later his father returned to his native Tobago, despite a tearful Danny begging him to stay.
He says: “The push-pull from the female felt very similar to home . . . there was a sadness to it.
“Even though on the outside it looks like I’m having a great time with all these women, deep down I’m constantly letting people down.
"Constantly hurting people. Constantly hurting myself because I’m acting from a place of pain.”
As his personal life and partying became as much of a focus as his sporting performance, he says the attention began to have an impact on his mental health.
Managers stopped selecting him and his career began to suffer.
Danny became trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy, admitting: “It’s sometimes easy to play the character that’s being portrayed.”
But he has now turned his life around and hopes his book will give others suffering hope that they can too.
He said: “There is a lot of suffering going on right now — with people struggling with social media, depression, anxiety and loss.
“So I’ve written the book in the hope that when people read it, they get to see a way out . . . because I know there’s a time when I didn’t feel like I could see it.”
The star, who played 16 times for England — winning his last cap in 2018 — and left Bath last year, is now enjoying a settled life in Kent after finally finding true love.
Danny married mental health campaigner Victoria Rose, 42, in 2021, a year after they first met. He is a stepdad to her children — and a doting grandad too.
Danny smiles and says: “I live every day so happy because I’ve got the most beautiful family. And I’ve learned so much from my career.
“I didn’t get what I wanted in terms of caps and numbers, but I know in my day I was the best at what I did.
“I’m very happy with how things panned out because it was all something to learn from.
"I could have learned lessons quicker, but I learned them as I was meant to.”
Kelly was accused of cheating on her ex-boyfriend Jason Statham, after growing close to her co-star Billy Zane on the set of thriller movie Three in 2004.
Kelly and Billy, now 57, were spotted strolling arm-in-arm in Saint-Tropez that summer, and made things official soon after.
Friends of Jason, 56, said he was “hammered” by the betrayal.
- WHO Am I? by Danny Cipriani, is published by HarperCollins on September 14, price £22.
