where should I look first for a basic overview of the Heather Mills thing, like when they started dating, etc? I am not ready for a deep dive but I feel like I don't really understand even the basics. thought you might be the person to ask. thank you :)
I can supply that overview, if you'd like - please feel free to ask any followup questions you may have (you will probably have some followup questions - I feel like only 1968 comes close to 1998-2008 for sheer insanity in Paul's biography, but at least he spread this breakdown out over a decade instead of cramming it into a few months lol).
In the broadest of strokes, Paul met - or rather, clapped eyes on - Heather Mills at the inaugural Pride of Britain Awards on 20 May 1999. He was there to present an animal welfare award in Linda's name and she was there to introduce a disabled young person who was being recognized. This is 13 months after Linda died and, if I may be crude, Paul was in the midst of the longest sex drought of his entire adult life.
HM is 25.5 years younger than Paul - younger than his daughter Heather and, like, 1.5 years older than Mary. She had, after what sounds like a clusterfuck of an unstable childhood (with multiple unreliable narrators, including HM herself, but it does seem pretty indisputable that it was a mess), embarked upon a modeling career, interrupted by a brief marriage and a subsequent stint as a ski instructor in Slovenia, right as Yugoslavia collapsed and fractured into an extended period of violent conflict and instability. The nature of her modeling career and of some of her relationships would later be subjected to scrutiny and debate, but the main thing to be aware of is that this was not high-fashion modeling - it was, like, swimsuits and some ~glamour photography~ (aka softcore porn). Then, in 1993, she was struck by a police motorcycle while crossing a road in London and, among other injuries, her left leg was amputated below the knee. As a result of this accident and its aftermath, she became a figure in the UK tabloids ("Plucky Model Overcomes Tragic Disability" kind of stuff) and embarked on a career as an advocate for amputees and a motivational speaker. She had some work as a TV presenter and worked to bring prosthetic limbs to people in war zones, including the former Yugoslavia. Many of those folks lost their limbs in incidents involving landmines, so that became a cause of interest to her as well. It's important to note that, despite her flexible relationship with the truth, she never claimed to have lost her leg via a landmine, which is a frequent misconception - that's truly an instance of people putting two and two together and getting five, because she's always been perfectly upfront about the nature of her accident.
There's a lot of conflicting information about much of their relationship, but the short version that is pretty universally agreed upon is that, although they didn't speak to each other at the Pride of Britain thing, Paul, through the magic of being Paul McCartney, got her number and rang her up in June 1999 to offer funding for a project in Sierra Leone. They began meeting and, at some stage, also began shagging. The timeline is quite murky - deliberately so, I think, as she was at that time engaged to a documentary filmmaker who had proposed to her after a 12-day shoot in Cambodia. She broke off the engagement five days before their planned wedding. Speculation that she and Paul were in a relationship began that autumn, but they were not "officially", publicly an item until January 2000. He proposed to her on 23 July 2001 - my 10th birthday, which felt like a huge slap in the face at the time, lol - and they married on 11 June 2002 in a massive shindig in Ireland. Despite asserting that, due to past ectopic pregnancies and other health issues, it was unlikely that she'd be able to conceive or carry a pregnancy to term, they welcomed a child on 28 October 2003, who I generally refer to as B to avoid potential misgendering or deadnaming. (It came out during their divorce that she'd had a miscarriage prior to B, which means she'd been pregnant twice before their first anniversary.)
Now, there was gossip from quite early on that their relationship was volatile - rumors of screaming rows, an incident about a month before the wedding where her engagement ring somehow flew out of a hotel window - and that Paul's adult children really, really hated HM, especially Stella. The tabloid media, which gave her extremely favorable coverage after her accident, turned on her in a big way. There was a lot of discourse that, especially through a 2026 lens, is incredibly misogynistic and ableist. Paul was running a lot of defense and interference for her, but not to a degree she felt was satisfactory. She also had ambitions to become a talkshow host in the US and Paul did leverage his connections to try and make that happen. This was ultimately for naught, due to her being Not Very Good at it, and she blamed Paul for it. HM also has a... flexible relationship with the truth, which became apparent long before she ever said anything negative about Paul.
By 2005, things looked increasingly rocky from the outside, but nothing official transpired until 17 May 2006, when a purportedly joint statement was released announcing their separation. Personally, I question how "joint" this actually was, because I believe HM was in the US at the time and she was, even after the statement, giving rather mixed signals about the state of their marriage. There was always a 50-50 custody situation with B. Then, on 17 July, Paul filed for divorce on the grounds of HM's unreasonable behavior - a fact the media cottoned on to later that month. In October, HM returned fire, denying unreasonable behavior on her part and alleging, to put it mildly, unreasonable behavior by Paul. A few days later, her Cross-Petition (or a draft thereof) was somehow leaked to the UK tabloids, leading to the publication of her claims that Paul was physically and emotionally abusive and drank and drugged to excess. This drama and the hammering out of a financial settlement dragged on until March 2008 - when HM was awarded much, much less money than she'd been asking for - and they were finally, mercifully divorced in May of that year. (In the meantime, Paul had started seeing Nancy after Hot Paul Summer '07 concluded and HM had had a truly unhinged crashout on British television. It was Quite A Time.)
There's a lot more to it even than that, but those are the basics - the stuff that's mostly undisputed and/or indisputable, anyway, lol. I hope this was helpful and, as I said, don't hesitate to ask me for clarification or further info!
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