The latest on Nadja's case...

From the BBC News webpage:

A singer from the German girl band No Angels arrested on suspicion of infecting a partner with HIV has been released from custody.

Prosecutors say Nadja Benaissa, 26, had unprotected sex with three men without informing them she was infected, and that one later tested positive himself.

Ms Benaissa's lawyers said she should enjoy the presumption of innocence.

A spokesman for a court in the town of Darmstadt said her release was subject to certain undisclosed conditions.

Ms Benaissa was arrested in Frankfurt 10 days previously, before she was due to perform in a solo concert. The prosecutor's office in the western town of Darmstadt said she had been detained because of the "urgent suspicion" that she slept with three people between 2004 and 2006, without telling them she was HIV-positive.

She reportedly faces a possible charge of grievous bodily harm. But her lawyers note that there is no proof that she infected anyone.

Benaissa was chosen to join No Angels in 2000 through the TV casting show Popstars.
The group recorded a series of hits and emerged as Germany's most successful girl band.

Nadja Benaissa's shocking arrest

Many people have been asking me to comment on Nadja's arrest recently, as she is one of the original members of the girlgroup 'No Angels', the band I helped form on the German show 'Popstars'.

On April 11, 2009, Nadja was arrested on suspicion of having had unprotected intercourse on several occassions in 2004 and 2006 without beforehand informing her partners that she is HIV-positive, allegedly infecting one partner with HIV. She faces a possible charge of dangerous bodily harm. She was remanded in custody, after a judge ruled there was a danger she might repeat the alleged offence. If found guilty, the offence would carry a sentence of six months to ten years imprisonment.

Obviously, I'm in shock about the whole case. This is just awful. And it's weird to read something like that about someone you know.

When we picked Nadja for the band, one of the reasons was the fact that she had been living quite a 'hard life' up till then. She was a single mum & was desperately trying to make ends meet. She was a bit wild child before, but it seemed that she had faced her demons. I didn't know that she had caught HIV (I assume she became infected during those early years), but we were well aware of her past & we wanted to give her the chance to have a better future. For herself and for her daughter too.

Everything seemed to have worked out so great and now this...

Some people asked me what I expected was going on through her mind. Did she think 'If I am going to die, I'm bringing some people down with me'? Surely not. I can't imagine that that would be the case.

I did once know a young rent boy (hanging out in the London gay scene, I used to know many) who was HIV-positive. He had told me so himself and I also knew the person he caught it from. Soon after he had poured his heart out to me, he 'disappeared' from the scene. No one knew where he had gone and we were all quite worried about him, but assumed that he had gone back to be with his family.

Roughly a year later, he showed up on my doorstep. He looked like any other 19-year-old. Healthy, clean, well-dressed, etc. He came in and told me about his life. He had moved up North, got a job and a new girlfriend. He chatted for ages and was all happy and bubbly. I, on the other hand, got quieter by the minute and wondered how he was dealing with the HIV and wondered if he had told his new, young girlfriend about his past.

When I asked him, he just blew up in my face. 'What are you suggesting? Are you saying I'm gay? I'm not gay. I'm not HIV positive. You're full of s***t!' He stormed out of my house and I never saw him again. This was before mobile phones, email accounts, etc. So I didn't have any way to contact him again.

When I discussed his reaction with another friend who's a counsellor to HIV and Aids patients, he told me that- sadly enough- this is a reaction they see more often than anyone realizes. Many people go into complete denial and continue to infect others by pretending 'that nothing is wrong'.

Is this what happened in Nadja's case? I don't know. But it's one possible explanation for what happened. Of course, this doesn't make her reckless behaviour any more excusible.

Let this be a lesson to everyone though, that we can't be complacent when it comes to safe sex. Even the most beautiful, successful, 'picture of health' people can be HIV carriers & they may not share their health status with you, if they are even aware of it to start with.

So be safe!

The truth of reality TV shows (How we put together the German superstar girl band 'No Angels')

I've recently started a MySpace page, only because someone else was going around pretending to be me on MySpace. So now I have my own really bad MySpace page as I have no idea how to make it look nice (anyone wants to help spice it up a bit?)

Anyhow, it's a nice tool for catching up again with people from 'my old life'. People like the 'No Angels' girls. This was the band that we put together on the first Popstars series in Germany in 2000/2001.

So, let me tell how they were chosen.... At the end of all the auditions, the jury and the production team gets together and discusses their points of view. Throughout the series there had been people who would have been booted off by the judges, but the production team demanded that they stayed on as they made 'good television' for whatever reason (being funny, being overly emotional, etc.) But, at the end of the series, it was all about who would make the best band.

We (Rainer Moslener& I as part of the jury, the record label & the production company/future management company) shuffled around with photographs of the girls and there were several possible routes to take. The record company and some of the people in production were leaning towards a very 'safe' formula. They simply wanted the prettiest 'girly-girls' to form a band. I disagreed. Passionately!

My very first choice for the band was Lucy, who is everything but a pretty 'girly-girl'. She is brash, she is wild, she's 'in ya face' and she is an extremely hard working woman. I was convinced that she would set the pace for the band & that she would give it a feel all of its own.

Lucky enough, Rainer backed me up. But we were pretty much on our own on this one. We also both strongly believed in Nadja, even though we realized that her voice was not that well suited for straight-forward pop music. It is almost 'too soulful' for that. Still, her voice had been able to bring us all to tears before, so for us she was a definite 'yes!' The fact that she was a struggling single mother made us even more determined to give her a chance.

There was one girl (Called Curley, if I remembered right?) who I had really wanted in the band. And guess why we didn't pick her? Was it lack of talent or charisma? No. We didn't pick her because she was too tall. It was an awful reason for someone to miss this chance of a lifetime and she deserved that chance, for sure. But next to the girls that we had already chosen, she looked weird. It is something that none of us normally think about, but when you put a boy of girl band together, they have to look 'right' when you put them all next to each other & having one person being much taller just looks 'wrong'. It really does.

So we couldn't have her in the band. And it broke my heart to tell her that. I never actually had the guts to tell her the real reason why she wasn't picked. It was just such a crap reason for losing out on a chance like this.

One other girl (who did make it into the band), almost did not get picked because she used to pull weird faces whenever the camera was pointed at her. She would scrunge her nose up and it just made her look all 'piggy'. Still, Rainer and I argued that this was something that was easy to work on and we made sure she got into the band after all.

One of the girls was picked only because the was a 'steady worker'. Someone to complete the overall picture (5 looked nicer as a line-up than 4, we thought)

And that was that.

What I am trying to explain with this is the randomness of these processes. It could have gone so many different ways and so many line-ups were possible.

I did feel very hurt when I saw the girls back months after we had formed the band. Rainer and I had been the people who had battled for this particular line-up, but we were bad-mouthed a lot afterwards by people around the girls. So when I saw the girls at their 'Dome' performance, they were kind of cold towards me & once again my heart broke. I had felt like a mother to these girls and this band and now they acted (almost) like I was a stranger.

Even so, I couldn't contain my pride when I saw the whole stadium chant along to 'Daylight'. With tears running down my face, I knew we had made the right choice and I felt blessed to have been able to impact 5 people's lifes in such a profound way.