The pair, he alleged, often had conversations about wanting to get clean together, he said, but drug use became their way of feeling “normal” in their day-to-day lives amid Winehouse’s massive fame.
They were also part of the early 2000s phone hacking scandal. “We got our phones hacked,” he said. “Yeah, I got interviewed by the police years ago about having our phones tapped, which is crazy.” Shortly after Winehouse’s death in 2011, reporter Charles Lavery claimed that Winehouse and Fielder’s phones were often tapped and that the information was used to preempt when Winehouse would arrive at various rehab clinics, so that photographers could wait outside to get pictures of her entering or leaving treatment.
Fielder and Winehouse divorced in 2009. During and after their marriage, Fielder spent several stints in prison. In 2006, he was sentenced to 27 months for attacking a pub landlord in Hoxton, East London and attempting to bribe the victim. In June 2011, he was sentenced to 32 months for burglary and possession of an imitation firearm.
They had spoken about reconciling before Amy’s death
According to Fielder, he and Winehouse remained close following their divorce in 2009. Although they didn’t spend lots of time together and she had a new boyfriend at the time of her death, they had, he claimed, discussed the possibility of getting back together.
“Just before I got told that Amy passed away, the last letter that I received was Amy […]said, ‘Me and you, let’s really, really give it a go as friends,’” he recalled. “And I said, ‘Let’s do it, we’ll always be friends.’”
However, he said, a few weeks earlier, they had been discussing “should we get back together?”
“We tentatively talked about it,” he said. “And then she decided you know what? Yeah, cool it. So I was like, ‘Okay that’s cool.’ And then she obviously never got that letter.”
He found out about Amy’s death while in prison
“The week Amy passed, I was in jail, unfortunately, we were still very much talking about the possibility of reconciling again,” Fielder said on the podcast.
“It’s quite something to be — not only to lose a part of yourself, your best mate let’s say, someone you loved and still was intentionally close to — lose that person, be blamed for it, mourning alone in jail, ostracised in the press — as in, like, it’s his fault,” he recalled of the period that followed Winehouse’s death.
Fielder claims he fell back into addiction issues as a result. “It took me a long time to get out of that and to give my head a real good shake — to look at myself.”
He still feels blamed for Amy’s death
As for his motives for coming on Brunson’s podcast, he explained that he hoped to reclaim his narrative, as he still feels blamed by the media for Winehouse’s death.
“I’m never, ever here to say, ‘Hey Amy was bad, you know,’ Not at all. But I know Amy wouldn’t want me to still be sat here 20 years later saying, ‘It was all my fault,’” he said. “She’d be saying, ‘Get it right babe, come on, tell them the truth.’ We were just young addicts at the time. We weren’t to start with and then we were and it could happen to anyone.”
