Tina Turner Revealed Psychic Predicted She;d Be a Star After Leaving Abusive Marriage in This 1981 PEOPLE Exclusive

After divorcing Ike Turner, the singer told PEOPLE she felt "proud" and "strong" as she moved on

In 1981, Tina Turner was changing the course of her life. Newly divorced from her abusive husband Ike Turner, "I'm better off than I've ever been," she told PEOPLE in a sit-down from her home in Los Angeles. "I have my freedom now. Everything I have, I've earned with my own blood."

The musical icon died on May 24, 2023, following a long illness. But in the years prior, she'd continued to thrive with that freedom, remaining on top of the music industry (plus Broadway and beyond) into her quieter twilight years in Switzerland.

Here, read Tina's moving 1981 interview. And for more incredible moments in pop culture history, pick up PEOPLE's special edition, 50 Years of Stars, on Amazon and newsstands now.

The first time Tina Turner toured with the Rolling Stones in 1966, “I didn’t know who the Stones were. They were just these white boys and Mick was the one who was always standing in the wings watching us. He was a little shy of me, but finally we started having fun and I tried to teach him some dances, because he’d just stand still on stage with the tambourine. He’d try things like the Pony or some hip movements backstage and we’d all just laugh.”

This fall Jagger decided to repay his old dance instructor by inviting Tina to open for the Stones at several dates along the way on their zillion-dollar U.S. tour. If this fall marks a comeback of sorts for the Stones, it is even more of one for Tina, who is finally returning to high rock visibility after years of touring on the hotel/casino circuit.

More than five years have passed since Tina’s bitter break with Ike Turner, her husband, sideman and musical collaborator on such classics as “Proud Mary.” Only now is Tina able to discuss what she claims were the harrowing events leading up to their split.

Related: Tina Turner's Life in Photos

According to Tina, she’d been contemplating leaving Ike for several years before the crucial moment came on July 1, 1976. The two of them had just left the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport in a limo.

“Ike was feeling a little irritable that day and hit me with the back of his hand,” she claims. “I wagged my finger at him, saying, ‘All right, you.’ Then he beat me the entire way from the airport to the hotel. When he fought,” claims Tina, “he used things and not just his hands. By the time we got to the hotel, the left side of my face was swollen like a monster’s. I never cried, though. I laughed. I laughed because I knew I was leaving. No more of this.”

Upstairs in their suite, Tina says, “I massaged him and cooed, ‘Can I order you any food, dear?’ Then he made the mistake of going to sleep.” With only 36 cents in her pocket and a Mobil credit card in her wallet, Tina split. A friend bought her a plane ticket home to L.A. and out of Ike’s life. “I felt proud,” Tina says. “I felt strong. I felt like Martin Luther King.”

She went into hiding with some friends in Hollywood, but after about two weeks, she says, Ike found her. “I looked out the window and there was a Rolls-Royce and Ike in his boots with what seemed like 500 people with him. I screwed up my courage and said, ‘No way am I going back there.’ ” (Ike Turner declines to be interviewed. He has dropped out of the music business and was arrested earlier this year for allegedly shooting a Los Angeles newspaper deliveryman in the ankle.)

After she got a lawyer and filed for divorce, she says, “gunshots were fired into my home, one of my girlfriends’ car was burned and there were threats. I’m not saying that Ike did it. I don’t think he would have hurt me, but he wanted to get close and scare me.”

Tina says that the ultimate divorce settlement in 1978 gave him everything. “My peace of mind was more important,” she explains. “Whatever was involved in our lives — property, masters, royalty rights — he got.”

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During the marriage she had diamonds, furs and fancy cars (including a 12-cylinder hardtop convertible Jaguar), but, she confesses, “I was just a shadow. Ike took care of everything — the sound, the band, hiring people, management and money ... He was very loving,” Tina concedes. “He helped a lot of people in trouble. But you owed him your life. He didn’t give freely.” (One ex-employee remembers being destitute and going home from a visit with Ike to find $1,000 in his coat pocket.)

After seven years the passion in their marriage existed mainly on stage. Ike had also become involved with one of his backup singers. Both Ike and Tina dabbled with astrology and psychic phenomena. But it was Buddhism that changed Tina’s life. She began meditating, studying and chanting. “When Ike saw me chanting,” she says, “the veins in his face popped out. He didn’t want to hear about anything that would give me power.”

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“When I left, I was living a life of death. I didn’t exist,” she recalls. “I didn’t fear him killing me when I left, because I was already dead.”

Today Tina lives alone in a spacious house in Los Angeles. She sees her now-grown sons and has a few close friends (including Ann-Margret). She regularly has sessions with a psychic, Carol Dryer, who Tina says guided her spiritually through her liberation. It all makes Tina recall the first psychic reading she had back in the ’60s. The reader, she says, told her: “You will be among the biggest of stars. A partner of yours will fall, like a leaf from a tree in autumn. You will survive and go on.”

PEOPLE's special edition, 50 Years of Stars, is available on Amazon and newsstands now.

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