Why does anyone go on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!? Sometimes there’s an obvious reputation-washing agenda, which annoyingly seems to work – people who are really hated come out more popular (Matt Hancock, for example). Other times it looks as if they need the money. For Tulisa, born Tula Paulinea Contostavlos 36 years ago in north London, her recent stint sounds more like aversion therapy. “I had a lot of fear surrounding exposure,” she says, “and I got to the point where I thought: ‘Am I holding on to this fear because of what people have done to me in the past? Am I letting other people change my perception of what my career is and could be?’ I didn’t want to feel that way any more.”

It wasn’t really about winning (she got voted off in week three) and, as for the rest, the result was inconclusive. She didn’t stick around to watch the winner crowned, as is customary, but flew home from Australia early, overwhelmed. “I came out, still followed by cameras, all tits and teeth, and it wasn’t until I was on my own that I felt this introvert-overload. I was hyperventilating, crying. It was too much.” She was never able to determine, “Is this about a fear I have of being in the spotlight? Or is the person I’ve become just not the kind of person that wants fame any more?”

I meet her in central London, vivacious, big-eyed and titchy in the huge boardroom of her management’s office. She can come across as carefree, but that feels more like an eagerness to create a nice vibe than an actual absence of misfortune, which she has had in spades. But the standout points since Tulisa became famous in 2008, as one-third of the R&B/hip-hop group N-Dubz, tell a story as much about the remarkable vindictiveness of the celebrity ecosystem as about one woman’s resilience and drive.

Tulisa’s parents split up when she was nine. Her mother struggled with mental illness, and the singer has always been open about how hard her childhood was. In 2010, when she was 22, she made a BBC documentary about being a teenage carer. “The whole reason I was so hungry for fame was to get out of that life. When I was young, I used to sit there, banging my head against the wall, going: ‘I have to make it.’ That’s why I was skipping school, to go to the studio, from the age of 11 – it was to work on my craft.”

N-Dubz – Tulisa and her cousin Dappy, plus Fazer – were instantly pretty big, with Top 10 singles and albums, and were signed to the US label Def Jam by 2010. “A lot of the press disliked us, but the proof was in the sales – we were a renowned act in the UK, we were selling big, big numbers. I think it was a culture thing. We had a really wide fanbase, but some of it was the naughty kids. We were the voice of naughty Britain.”

In 2011, Tulisa replaced Cheryl as a judge on The X Factor, through sheer power of will. “Seriously. I’d manifested that, to the point I was on my sofa, saying: ‘I’m going to have that job.’ My words were: ‘I’m going to be the ghetto Cheryl Cole. That job is mine.’ I believed it in my heart.” After a heavy pause, she says: “Careful what you wish for.”

She was great as a judge and never got into any of the skirmishes and feuding the panel was famous for. “I was a little rebel, really, always the black sheep.” But it was a gear-change, fame-wise, and she was soon embroiled in what came to be known as the “homewrecker” scandal, in which the Sun published an untrue story based on the testimony of the ex-girlfriend of Danny Simpson, a footballer Tulisa was dating. Contrary to the Sun’s story, Simpson had already split up with his ex when he met Tulisa, and they both successfully sued the paper for defamation. “But no one ever hears about the aftermath,” Tulisa notes. “So once these things are out, the damage is done.”

This whole affair featured some outrageous behaviour by the tabloids – the Mirror also ran the story, even after it lost a bidding war with the Sun, and then went after the ex for damages, on a story it had never even paid for – but that was nothing on what came next.

Mazher Mahmood – the Sun’s infamous Fake Sheikh – originally tried a sting operation to catch Tulisa taking drugs. “They would have known straight away that that wouldn’t work,” she says, “because they approached my best friend and my manager, who both said: ‘Don’t mention drugs to Tulisa – she’s very anti-drugs’.” Switching to an even more destructive plan, Mahmood and an assistant tried to entrap her to supply class A drugs. She was arrested and later charged just before Christmas in 2013. “I had a rucksack in court with me every single day, because everyone was saying: ‘You’re going to prison.’”

The case was dismissed the following summer, once the judge had determined that Mahmood had lied to the court, but it was a long time before it was clear what we were looking at. The hours upon hours Mahmood and his associates had spent trying to deceive Tulisa, the other witnesses he’d put pressure on: much of the fine detail only emerged during Mahmood’s own trial, a year later, at the end of which he was sentenced to 15 months for tampering with evidence.

Yet others understood instinctively what this case was about: in 2013 the guerrilla fashion designer Sports Banger made his Free Tulisa T-shirts, which were instantly everywhere and arguably launched him as an artist and activist. “I don’t know what it was that chimed with me,” he said later. “I just thought it was bollocks. The UK tabloids plastered her across every front page. The whole thing was a fucking disgrace. Tulisa is a homegrown working-class queen.”

At the time, and since, she has had the sense that she was being brought down a peg or two, that she was never quite humble enough for the red tops. “There’s a game to be played in show business, but I won’t play it. I’m happy to abide by rules that I deem to be for the greater good, or that are logical. What I don’t deal in is nonsense.” She also heard through the grapevine that it was retaliation because she had sued the Sun over the homewrecker story. “It’s all speculation – it could have been a million things – but that’s something I’ve been told.”

Tulisa’s legal costs for the drugs case were hundreds of thousands of pounds and she lost all her endorsements. “From the second [the arrest] happened, no one wanted to touch me.” She says that overall the sting cost her about £2m, lost her a book deal for a novel she’d been writing, and spawned copycat operations. Two fake princesses tried to befriend her in Dubai, posing as “massive Tulisa fans, wanting to party with me. They already know I don’t do drugs from the sting. So in my mind, I’m thinking: ‘Are you going to slip something in my bag, send me to prison for life?’ I was checking the lining of my suitcase before flying home, terrified. It has taken me years to admit the trust issues this all gave me.”

Even given all that, she still says it was the sex tape, posted online in 2012 by an ex, Justin Edwards, that traumatised her the most. “Because it’s had the most long-term effects. It has really affected my love life and my intimacy.” Tulisa’s lawyers acted swiftly and obtained an injunction to have the tape taken down, but still, “I feel so much shame surrounding it that my relationship to sex doesn’t feel the same.”

She told I’m a Celebrity teammates last month that she was demisexual – it’s an orientation where you have to form a strong emotional connection with someone before you feel physically attracted to them – “and I’ve kind of always been that way. But me being that kind of person, and then having the experiences I’ve had, has put me so far back into my shell. I only deal with people I already know. I’ve just recycled ex-boyfriends for the past 10 years. A new person coming in doesn’t have a chance.

“I just ask myself: ‘Would I keep this person in my life, even as a friend, for the rest of time?’ And if I don’t have that feeling, I wouldn’t want them as a lover. I just don’t get the tingles. Some people will see a guy walking in the street, and go: ‘Oh my God, he’s gorgeous.’ I can really appreciate aesthetics: I can think: ‘He looks beautiful – I totally get why everyone fancies him.’ But doing anything physical with him wouldn’t even cross my mind.”

She has been celibate for three years but keeps the faith. “I feel like the universe is good. I don’t think it’s going to leave me an isolated and alone individual for the rest of my life. What’s meant for me won’t pass me by.”

Ten years ago, just as the drugs case was ending, Tulisa started getting flare-ups of inflammation on one side of her face, which would then tail off into Bell’s palsy, a droop on her mouth that could last for months. She got those symptoms under control, but then, five years ago, had persistent, low-level swelling that felt like “ants constantly crawling in my face, like it was on fire”. It made her look puffy and asymmetrical. “It was not fun, looking in the mirror every day and hating what you see. And also, going: ‘This isn’t my face’, and people going: ‘Well, it is your face now, because you’re full of filler.’ But that was because half my face was full of fluid, so I got fillers in the other half. It was torture.”

She eventually found a surgeon who did an explorative operation and found chronically infected cysts in her cheek. She had her last operation just before she went into the jungle, and “instantly, my face was smaller. Honestly, the depression that it caused …”

In 2022, after an 11-year hiatus, N-Dubz resumed touring and releasing music; their fourth studio album, Timeless, came out last year. “That was our biggest selling tour ever. We did four O₂ [Arena] shows – we could never have done that 10 years ago. Our album was the highest charting one yet. None of this other drama ever affects me when I’m in N-Dubz – it’s a safe space for me. It’s chaotic, and magical, all at once.” She says Dappy is the only person she ever shouts at, although after I’m a Celeb the tabloids had more stories about her screaming matches with her best friend, all unfounded. “All my friends said: ‘You never scream at anyone. Oh, except Dappy.’ That’s the problem with families,” she says. “We’re like two siblings fighting. There’s no boundaries.”

Other plans for the future include publishing the novel she was writing in 2014, when she was defending herself in court. “I was in this really passionate, toxic relationship at the time, so it was kind of Sex and the City, on a drugs charge. I’ve been writing that on and off for the past 10 years.” She also plans to develop properties in Cheshire and Hertfordshire in the shape of hobbit dwellings. “Tulisa transforms the whole of the UK with fantasy nerd theme parks” is the next chapter she is manifesting.

Tulisa has come out on top, in other words – still weirdly targeted by the tabloids, but with the freedom to follow her own interests, a community, a fanbase, a passion for hobbits. It just shouldn’t have had to be this hard. There is no justification for it.