It is no longer news that the marriage between Oluwo of Iwo, Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi Ilufemiloye Telu 1, and his Canadian-Jamaican wife, Chanel Chin, has crashed. However, controversies continue to trail the events that led to the crash with the former queen revealing she was treated like a prisoner in the palace.

Speaking in a Saturday Punch interview, the mom-of-one revealed that the Oluwo barred her from speaking to friends and relatives, including the ‘Oloris’ [queens] of other monarchs in the area.

Chanel further revealed that Oba Akanbi has six personalities like the protagonist of the 2016 American film, Split. She added that she gave the personalities names.

Despite her revelations, Chanel insisted she loved the Iwo monarch.

She said,

“While I was in this relationship with Oluwo, I was forbidden to speak with anybody. I was not allowed to speak with anyone from my past, even friends that I came into Nigeria with, either male or female. I have Yoruba friends in Canada, but I was not allowed to speak to them because he did not want anybody to tell me my rights. When I first got to the palace, one of the things I wanted to do was to wear coral beads. But he was saying, ‘It’s not (our) culture, you don’t need it.’ And my friends that are Yoruba said I could wear beads. But he said, ‘Don’t talk to them, they are jealous of you!’ So, I was totally isolated.

“We had 30 Oloris (wives of the king) in our jurisdiction, married to the kings around us. But I was not allowed to mix with them. If you go to Iwo and ask the Oloris about their relationship with me, they will tell you they didn’t talk to me. I was not allowed to even go out and mingle with the people of Iwo. I was just inside the house from morning to night like a prisoner and I stayed because of my child.

“There were some people I reached out to privately to help me, and the Yoruba women told me, ‘Just pray to God; pray that he will change’. So, that was what I was doing. In that palace, it was me, my son and God. Not even my parents were allowed to visit. No one from Canada was allowed to come to see me. I was there for four years on my own. There is an unspoken culture of silence within the royal household.

“He has six personalities. When you wake up in the morning, you don’t know the kind of personality that will greet you. And I have names for them. The one that is violent, I call it Dexter. The one that is nice, I call Paul. The one that is sensationalist, I call it Jerry. I know him because I was with him for four years. I won’t lie and say I did not love him. I loved him.”