Why you won’t see Tina Turner again: Star’s retreat from public life explained

Her retreat from public life has made world headlines and worried fans – and there’s a “painful” reason you won’t hear from Tina Turner again.

Proud Mary’s enduring shame.

That’s the haunting theme of Tina Turner’s new bombshell documentary Tina, out March 28 on Foxtel.

The singer is speaking her truth one last time in a film that’s being hailed as her bittersweet “goodbye” – a reality that sent social media shockwaves through her loyal fanbase on Tuesday.

But the growling, galvanising entertainer who left the cotton fields of Nutbush City Limits behind to be The Best is not dying – she’s just tired of dredging up past traumas for her adoring public.

The film tracks Turner’s rise to global music icon.

“I had an abusive life,” said Turner, 81, in the forthcoming film from Academy Award-winning directors Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin. “There’s no other way to tell the story. It’s a reality. A truth.”

And yes, Tina retraces the music icon’s childhood neglect and hardscrabble steps through the domestic violence, sexual abuse and suicide attempts she survived throughout her 16-year marriage to late ex-husband Ike Turner.

Turner’s black eyes, busted lips and other physical wounds are long-healed since she left Ike after one final bloody beating in 1976 – but the emotional scars of the sadistic torment are reopened whenever her abuser’s name is mentioned.

Even decades after escaping her toxic marriage – and surviving a stroke, cancer, organ transplant and the suicide of a child – one of the world’s most beloved musical artists can’t escape the public’s inquiring minds. And it hurts.

“Every time she’s asked to re-tell her story, as beneficial as it may be for other people to hear and be empowered by, it can be extremely painful and re-traumatising for her,” filmmaker Martin, 41, told The Post.

Martin and Lindsay’s documentary, a tale of not just tears but triumph, features archival footage of never-before-seen interviews and intimate confessionals from Turner; most notably, audio from her first public conversation about Ike’s abuse during an interview with People magazine in 1981.

Tina has been connected with her abusive ex ‘in a way she could never escape’.

“Her motivation for coming forward about the truth of her time with Ike was about trying to free herself from him,” Lindsay told The Post. “But the irony is that it just connected her to him in a way that she could never escape.”

Bound by a promise to never leave Ike – a vow made out of the pain she felt after being abandoned as a child on a cotton field in Nutbush, Tennessee, by unloving parents – Turner endured what she described as incessant brutality.

Born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939, after becoming the lead singer of Ike’s rhythm and blues band following a chance meeting at a St Louis nightclub in 1957, their professional relationship as the Ike & Tina Turner Revue transformed into a troubled romance.

“He beat me with a shoe stretcher,” Turner said of one of Ike’s first acts of abuse. She was pregnant with their son Ronnie at the time.

“After that he made me go to bed and he had sex with me,” she said. “That was the beginning of the torture. I had to lay down and he’d stand over me and [slap] this coat hanger on my fanny. I swear to God. My fanny swoll 2 inches higher.”

Immediately following the sexual violence, which she said became a constant after they got married in 1962, Turner claimed Ike would force her to perform.

“He made me go right back on stage and said, ‘You sing mother f***er because you made me do it.’”

Ike – a musician and songwriter credited with composing the first ever rock ‘n’ roll song, Rocket 88, in 1951 – wanted to control Turner, former band member Jimmy Thomas said in the documentary.

Tina outran the pain and forged a massive solo career.

Throughout the film, Lindsay and Martin weave in profound remarks on Turner’s life and legacy from friends like Thomas, her beloved second husband Erwin Bach and MTV’s Kurt Loder, who co-authored her 1985 autobiography I, Tina. Also featured are Golden Globe-winning actress Angela Bassett who earned an Oscar nod as Turner in the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It, and talk show titan Oprah Winfrey.

The documentary is indeed Turner’s final farewell to fans who stuck with her through it all.

“The spotlight is not interesting to her anymore,” Martin told The Post. “She worked for 60 years, and now she’s done with being repeatedly reminded of her past trauma.”

Still, Tina tells the full story: After divorcing Ike in 1978 – famously walking away from their marriage and music empire with nothing but her stage name – Turner reinvented herself into a Grammy Award-winning rock ‘n’ roll queen at an age most artists are put out to pasture.

As a boundary-bashing middle-aged woman in the ’80s and ’90s, she skyrocketed up the charts with hits What’s Love Got To Do With It, Private Dancer and The Best.

Turner also set the Guinness World Record for holding the largest rock concert by a single performer, received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, spawned a Broadway musical based on her life and is a 2021 nominee for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

She also found the love of her life.

Tina Turner and husband Erwin Bach. Picture: Jacopo Raule/Getty

“He was just so different. So laid back. So comfortable. So unpretentious,” Turner said of first meeting current husband, German music producer Erwin Bach, 27 years ago at an airport. “I really needed love. I just needed to love a person.”

Their attraction is more than a simple spark, Bach, 65, added.

“It’s love – it’s something we both have for each other. I always refer to it as an electrical charge,” said Bach in the documentary. “I still have it … That feeling is still with me. It’s in my heart.”

However, despite her legendary success as a solo artist and enduring love with Bach, Turner is still unable to flee the shadow of Ike.

“This [film] is her way of saying to the world once and for all, ‘These are the pieces [of my story] that I’m leaving. Now let me go,’” Lindsay said.

Turner survived a stroke in 2013, intestinal cancer in 2017 (the same year her husband donated a kidney to save her life) and the suicide of her 59-year-old son Craig in 2018. However, she still struggles from PTSD owing to the physical and sexual cruelty she endured at the hands of Ike. He died in 2007 aged 76 after a cocaine overdose.

“It hurts to have to remember those times,” Turner, who now lives in Switzerland, admitted in the film. “But at a certain stage, forgiveness takes over.

“Forgiving means not to hold on. You let it go because by not forgiving, you suffer.”

TINA explores the extraordinary life of one of music’s greatest icons, Tina Turner and premieres express from the US on Sunday, March 28 at 11am AEDT, with a prime time encore at 8.30pm AEDT on Foxtel Movies Premiere channel and available On Demand.

This story originally appeared on Page Six and is republished here with permission