Muhammad Ali's tangled love life leaves troubled legacy



Behind the immortal legend of Muhammad Ali lay a distinctly mortal private life that saw the great boxer married four times and have at least nine children – including two love-children - leaving behind a complex and divisive family legacy that threatens to tarnish his memory.


In the years before Ali’s death, family disputes have broken out into the open between his last wife and widow, Yolanda “Lonnie” Williams, and Ali’s younger brother, Rahman, and his estranged only son, Muhammad Ali Jr.

A cousin of Ali’s cousin, Charlotte Waddell, also claimed in an interview two years ago that Lonnie “controls everything” that Ali does, admitting to The Daily Mail, that “I can’t stand to be around her. It wouldn’t take me two seconds to spit in her face!”
Lonnie, who married Ali in 1986 after moving to California to be Ali’s full-time nurse three years after his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, is reported to have used her power of attorney over his affairs to estrange unwanted family members from Ali’s complex web of relationships.
In a separate interview, Muhammad Ali Jnr was reported to be living in a garret in a Chicago ghetto, telling a newspaper in 2013 that he had been almost entirely ostracised from his father since 2004.

Rahman Ali, now 72 and himself a former professional boxer who reportedly had six wives and was a main member of the Ali entourage after he finished his own brief career, was reported to have been forced by Lonnie out of their mother’s family home into a “modest flat”.

However over the years, Lonnie’s supporters have credited her with restoring order over Ali’s chaotic life which saw him make and lose several fortunes until financial stability was restored in 2006 when Ali sold his worldwide image rights for £30m.
Lonnie and Ali never had children of their own, but soon after they got married they adopted a five-year-old boy, Asaad Amin, who they raised as their own.

When the end of Ali’s life finally came, it was reported that Lonnie was at his bedside, along with Hana Yasmeen Ali and her sister Laila, who were the children from Ali’s third marriage to Veronica Porsche that lasted from 1977-1986.

Laila has pursued her own career as a professional fighter, remaining close to her father who would often appear at her fights, including the much anticipated 2001 bout between Laila and Joe Frazier’s daughter, Jackie Frazier-Lyde.

Ali’s relationship with Porsche – struck up during the 1975 ‘Thrilla in Manila’ fight against Joe Frazier where Porsche was working as a poster girl to add glamour to the occasion - effectively ended his second marriage to Belinda Boyd.
Boyd - renamed Khalilah Camacho-Ali after converting to Islam soon after their wedding - had four children with Ali during their decade-long marriage which began in 1967 when Boyd was only 17, three years after first catching the boxer’s eye while working in a Kentucky bakery.

Together they had three daughters, Maryum (a rapper and author who was also reportedly at the boxer’s death bed), Jamillah, Rasheda, and his only son, Muhammad Ali Jr.
Boyd fought tenaciously to keep her husband from straying, but in the end was unable to break his infatuation with Porsche. After their divorce Ms Boyd herself subsequently married three times, working briefly as an actress appearing in the Jane Fonda film, The China Syndrome.

During his turbulent marriage to Boyd, Ali is also reported to have had two love-children, the first, Miya, came in 1972 with a woman reportedly named Patricia Harvell and the second, Khaliah, in 1974, to a 16-year-old woman, Wanda Bolton, who changed her name to Aaisha Ali.

According to a proposal for her memoir, "Butterflies and Bees: A Woman's Search for Her Father" reported by the New York Daily News, Khaliah and her mother lived at Ali’s then-training camp where Ali’s then wife, Belinda Boyd, shared the parenting.
There have been several others who have claimed to be Ali‘s children, including in 2014 Kiiursti Mensah Ali, a 35-year-old from Houston Texas who bears a striking resemblance to Ali and whose mother, Barbara Mensah, claims to have had a relationship with Ali in his hey-day.

By the time of his death, Ali has been married four times, including a childless first marriage to Sonji Roi, a 23-year-old model and cocktail waitress, who Ali met in 1964, the year he won his first world title.
The marriage lasted only 16-months. Roi, who died in 2005, later blamed the break up on the insufferable pressure she was under to adopt Muslim dress codes and convert to Islam, later claiming she had been threatened with reprisals if she failed to conform.

 “I wasn’t going to take on all the Muslims,” she said after the divorce in January 1966, “If I had, I probably would have ended up dead.”








Source: Telegraph

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