FORMER Real Housewives of Cheshire star Leanne Brown has spoken for the first time about bankruptcy and her marriage split.
Back in April, it was revealed her estranged footballer husband Wes Brown, 43, owed a huge debt to the taxman and a car company.
He allegedly lost millions of pounds in failed property deals that shattered his wealth – and is now renting from Marcus Rashford.
Leanne, 46, has now broken her silence on the Elle Sera podcast, explaining how a string of bad investments and property crashes were to blame.
She said: “People have this perception of your life because your husband plays football and you have all this money coming in but people have no idea where that money’s going.
“They have no idea of what’s going on behind close doors, where you’re investing that money, who relies on you to provide for them and who’s taking advantage of you because that’s exactly what happened with us.
“There was such a struggle going on there for many years with us but nobody would be aware of that.
“With the market crashing as well, we had properties and then the market crashed, we couldn’t get rid of anything, like, huge properties.
“We were just advised very badly for the benefit of the people that were advising and taken advantage of a lot.
“But, where I am now, we have to take responsibility for that, we allowed that to happen, we allowed the control of somebody else to take control of our finances too much in the sense that we should have been more aware, we should have been more on top of it.”
Leanne, who shares daughters Halle, 20, Lilia, 15, and Lola, 12, with the sportsman, announced their separation last year.
The couple were together for more than 20 years and wed in 2009.
During her latest interview, Leanne confessed she’s struggling to be apart from their children, describing their co-parenting arrangement as “wounding”, and that she’s actively looking for a new man.
She said: “Just because you’ve separated from someone, you don’t have to be at each other’s throats. Although, it’s been really difficult just to go through that process in itself.
“Even though I was the one to leave, it’s such a massive change. 25 years is a long time and what’s been the most difficult is not waking up with my girls every day.
“I’m living in a separate house and they’re with their dad or with me, I don’t want to make rules. It’s not that they have to stay at their dad’s or mine, they’re old enough to make a decision.
“Sometimes I’ll say, ‘Are you coming to mine?’ and they’ll say, ‘No, I’m staying here,’ and it’s wounding for me to not have them there 24/7.”
Defender Wes spent 19 years at Manchester United – coming through the academy to make 262 appearances, winning 11 major trophies.
He also earned 23 senior England caps before finishing his club career with spells at Sunderland, Blackburn and then Kerala Blasters in India.
But according to the Daily Mail, he fell into a six-figure debt with HMRC and failed on car repayments.
The report, published in April, added that two creditors lobbied for him to be made bankrupt.
It was said the former £50,000-a-week ace only owed a few thousand pounds to the car finance firm.
But it was a series of property deals that went wrong and scuppered the 1999 Treble winner, known as one of the nicest men in football.
Wes lived a lavish lifestyle during his 20-year relationship with his wife and the mother of his three children Leanne.
But their divorce was costly and left him moving into a modest rented pad at ‘mate’s rates’ from United striker Rashford, while former team-mates Michael Carrick and Wayne Rooney have been particularly supportive of their pal.
A source told the Mail: “It may seem like Wes was earning big money — to most people he was — but the trouble was he was also trying to keep up with the lifestyle of team-mates earning five or six times more than he was.
“Most of his money disappeared in bad property deals. He overpaid on the farm that Leanne lives in. He spent something like £6million or £7m to buy that.
“They have tried to sell it but haven’t managed to, even after lowering the price to £4.75m. Any money left is tied up in the farm.
“A previous property of theirs was once listed at £4.5m but took seven years to sell, finally going for £2.4million — almost half price.”
