Vanessa Mai suffered from planks: ‘I locked myself in the toilet and cried’

Vanessa Mai suffered from Dieter Bohlen. She reports this in her new book “I do it Mai way”, from which the “Bild” quotes. The 30-year-old pop singer goes into detail.

At first she was completely “overwhelmed” working with boards at DSDS and was “dumbly” looking forward to the first meeting. At the same time, she was afraid of it. “And I wasn’t so wrong with this gut feeling,” Mai explains in her autobiographical book. When they got to know each other, 68-year-old Bohlen was not rude, but apparently wanted to define unequivocally “who’s boss here”. Mai writes: “To me he radiated authority, but there was also something intimidating about it.”

Mai also reports on a specific situation. The singer jokingly called her colleague “Uncle Dieter” in a joint interview for the casting show. But he didn’t like it at all. Mai had the feeling “that the room temperature suddenly cooled down”. She “didn’t understand the world anymore” when Bohlen replied, “I’ll give you Uncle Dieter!” Mai explains, “It seemed to me that I had crossed an invisible line.”

After that situation, she felt “completely undermined by Dieter”. She continues: “It was bad for me then. I was really worried. Not only by saying that, but also because I thought he would give me the cold shoulder. His role was that of the king. What he says is law. In my experience there is no one besides him.” Bohlen criticized her as a judge and put her songs in front of the camera. “I was not prepared for that at the time. I wasn’t sure at all.”

By the third or fourth day of shooting, Mai could no longer tolerate the kind of so-called “pop titan”. “When one of Dieter’s tips hit me again, I locked myself in the toilet and cried,” she writes. “Sobbing, I threatened to stop everything and never get out.” Her manager Andreas Ferber, to whom she is married today, calmed her down. She would have liked to stop working, but that was not possible because of the signed contracts. So she did the recordings for “Deutschland sucht den Superstar”. “I never talked about how hard it was for me then.”

At one point, she then noticed a plank that seemed to her “as if it had been replaced”. The reason: he wanted to produce Mai’s next album. From this, the singer learned how “the business” works. She thought, “You’re nice to me now, but I know that doesn’t mean you’re my friend. You’re probably nice because I’m useful to you. Well, then I’ll use you too.”

By the way: Dieter Bohlen recently started slandering Vanessa Mai again. According to the newspaper “tz”, the former star of “Modern Talking” said in an interview with Radio Hamburg: “I think she overestimates herself a bit.” He added that she “looks better than she sings”. And said, “Should I say she can sing if she can’t sing very well?” But Mai has known where she is with him for a long time.

(t-online, mbo)