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The anguished ex-wife of Frank Maloney today reveals in harrowing detail the devastating moment he confessed his transsexual secret to her.

Tracey, 47, also tells of her heartbreak at discovering the dad-of-two and boxing legend was going public last week with the news he is undergoing a sex change.

She says: “I would have gone on carrying his secret for him just to protect our daughters. But I wouldn’t have married him if I’d known he was a woman.”

Breaking her silence in a raw and emotional interview following 61-year-old Frank’s astonishing transition into a woman called Kellie, she tells how he begged her to turn a blind eye to his double life and keep the marriage going.

She says: “Most of the secret life he has revealed I have only just found out about. I never knew.

"I’m still dealing with the fallout from all this and the consequences it has for the family.

“It has been hard him coming out. I was glad our daughters didn’t know. All I wanted to do was to protect them.

“He is a brilliant father but it’s been devastating for them. He was their hero.”

(Image: John Gladwin / Nicholas Bowman / Sunday Mirror / Getty)

The air stewardess talks of the overwhelming emotions of that morning in October 2009 when her husband admitted he had been born into the wrong body and wanted to become a woman.

Tears filling her eyes, Tracey says: “He was visibly tortured and kept telling me he wanted to kill himself.

“On the eve of Halloween, we had a terrible row. He had been spending a lot of time in the spare room so I went upstairs and closed the door.

“I hardly slept and cried most of the night. I could hear Frank pacing around the house, which was not unusual.

“About 4am he came into the room and said he had something to tell me.

“I followed him down to the kitchen and he was sat there in his pyjamas crying. He finally looked up at me and said, ‘I am a woman’.”

Struggling to absorb his astonishing confession, she says: “I was utterly devastated. I knew at that moment that he had opened the lid on a box that could never ever be closed again.”

She says the “penny dropped”, adding: “I realised for the first time what had been tearing him apart.

“My stomach was churning as I tried to calm him down, tried not to show any shock.

“I felt sorry for him, not anger. He didn’t want to put himself or his family through this.

“In that split second everything changed for ever.”

Tracey says it was only then that she realised the cause of his terrible bouts of depression over the years.

“This was what he was never able to say on the nights he was at his worst,” she says. “He had tried so hard for this never to happen, for this never to come out.”

Traumatised and afraid, Tracey says Frank tried to convince her to keep up the pretence of a happy marriage.

She says: “I struggled with his reaction. He wanted to keep up a facade. He persuaded me it would be fine.”

(Image: Nicholas Bowman / Sunday Mirror)

At last Tracey understood why their once happy, 20-year relationship had dissolved into a series of furious rows. She says her husband’s depression and behaviour had become increasingly erratic before he revealed his secret.

He would vanish for weeks at a time. It later emerged that he kept a secret flat by the coast, stocked with female clothing. He’d also turned to therapists and hypnotists for help.

Pain etched across her face, Tracey says: “I’ve racked my mind to see if there was ever any clues about him being transgender, but there was nothing. Frank covered it up so well I never knew anything.

“He was a great husband, a fantastic father and a wonderful provider for his family.

“It was only about six years ago when things began to change. He first started getting very angry. Nothing seemed to please him and he was unsettled all the time.

“He had always been sociable but he became reclusive. We would be out at an event or with friends and he would just go home without me. I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong. And I kept asking him why this

was happening.

“Sometimes he would blame me saying, ‘It’s you – you’re not a good wife’. By then I knew things were serious.

“I never thought it was another woman. In 2008 he checked into a clinic for six weeks without telling us where he was.

“When he eventually returned he turned up with some people who claimed to be hypnotists and therapists. He wasn’t himself and I was worried. He asked me to listen to them.

"I kicked them out of the house and told him that he if went back to them the marriage was over.

“It was not the Frank I knew.”

Their attempts to rekindle the relationship were in vain, and her husband moved out of the family home in Kent in 2012. She says: “He’d already got his flat and he never even gave me the address.

“We were living completely separate lives by that point. I had known the truth for three years and we were growing more and more distant.

“It was traumatic. It had been his idea to stay but he was no longer a husband any more.

“We still had a good friendship. He always provided well and he was a good father to the girls.”

But she says things took a distressing turn for the worse when he visited at Christmas that year. Emotions were running high and eventually led Frank to make a desperate suicide attempt.

Tracey says: “That was a bad day. We were all really distraught and the girls and I wouldn’t go back into the house until he left.

“My daughter said to me, ‘you’re doing this to him’. I would rather she thought that than know the truth. I never wanted the children to know the truth.”

Soon afterwards, Frank started divorce proceedings.

Tracey says: “I never wanted to be divorced. Everybody assumed it was over something I’d done but I was never going to say anything.

“Last year, as the divorce was going through, was the toughest year of all.

(Image: John Gladwin / Sunday Mirror)

“It was hard because he wasn’t being honest. Everyone felt sorry for him. It looked like I’d abandoned him, like I’d only been there for the glory years.

“He allowed people to think it was my fault rather than face up to things. I wanted to file for divorce under ‘unreasonable behaviour’ on his part but in the end we went for ‘irreconcilable differences’. I would have never said anything about his secret. We are still friends and hopefully always will be. We speak nearly every day on the phone.”

The couple were originally introduced by a friend in Cardiff as Lennox Lewis was preparing to fight Frank Bruno in the October 1993 match dubbed the Battle of Britain.

Tracey says she was impressed by how nice Frank seemed. Despite their 14-year age gap, she says they started dating.

At that stage she had no idea he was a boxing manager and promoter, famous for his garish Union Jack suits.

They married in Lake Tahoe in 1997 after his client Lewis beat Oliver McCall to regain his World Boxing Council crown. The champ and his mother Violet attended the ceremony.

Tracey and Frank then flew to Venice for a brief honeymoon. They went on to have two daughters – now aged 19 and 13.

But Tracey reveals she is now “over Frank”, adding: “I am focused on moving on. My new life and daughters are the most important things.”

(Image: Allsport / Getty)

She says she’s yet to see Frank as Kellie and says she still can’t bring herself to call him anything but Frank.

“I’ve never met Kellie,” she says. “He showed me pictures once before from a distance.

“I still call him Frank and to the girls he will always be dad.

“He wrote to me last weekend saying in an email it was the ‘last time you will hear from me as Frank. I am writing to say goodbye’.”

Tracey adds: “I was angry at him letting himself be exposed. I was upset at him for being careless.

“But now this is real we all have to come to terms with it.

“I don’t wish he’d never walked into my life because we had some wonderful years together and he was a good husband.

“I wish he’d been honest, but I really, really want him to be happy now – and free.”