As the one year anniversary of the beloved Prince’s sudden death from an accidental overdose of the prescription drug, fentanyl, approaches, more details are emerging about his life that are equally as shocking as the cause of his death.

As we previously reported, Prince’s first wife, Mayte Garcia, is releasing a memoir titled The Beautiful One: My Life With Prince. She’s detailing everything she experienced for a decade with the man she loved dearly- the good, bad, and the ugly.

Mayte, who started out as Prince’s dancer in 1990 and was married to him from 1996 to 2000, has just dropped a hella big bombshell in her interview with People Magazine and in her book. In a nutshell she says at the time of their marriage she was clueless about his drug usage, but she had suspicions after several odd incidents and looking back now, she’s pretty certain her suspicions were correct. See what she revealed, to People Mag, about a very hidden incident Prince had that nearly cost him his life LONG before his April 16, 2016 death…

Her Admission & Suspicions

“I never actually saw Prince doing drugs. He didn’t want me to. I’m sure he knew what my reaction would be.”

Despite never witnessing Prince using drugs, she references several “disturbing occasions when he told me he was ‘sick’ or had a ‘migraine’ ” that seem to hint at the rock star’s substance abuse issues.

Clarity In Hindsight

“Looking back now and being much older I can see it was something else,” Garcia, now 43, tells PEOPLE. “I never saw him do anything – not even take an aspirin.”

Mayte’s Bombshell #1

And yet within weeks of the couple’s wedding on Valentine’s Day 1996, she received a late night phone call from one of her husband’s bodyguards, informing her that an unconscious Prince had been rushed to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. He claimed he’d combined wine and aspirin.

Bombshell #2

On another occasion, a distraught Prince pleaded with Garcia to return to his hotel room and “flush some pills [that he told her he’d left there] down the toilet.” His wife did exactly what was asked of her, admitting, “I didn’t question what it was.”

“I never told him about my thoughts of suicide [after their son died soon after birth] or how close I had come to doing it. […] But I started to think he knew, because my Vicodin kept disappearing. I assumed he was hiding them to keep me from hurting myself. In retrospect, I don’t know what to think.”

That stomach pumping incident is a really major revelation for two reasons:
(1) The thought that the world came THIS close to losing Prince 20 years ago and didn’t even know it, is scary.
(2) The ’96 incident sounds eerily similar to the reportedly near death emergency airplane landing incident Prince had on April 15, 2016. Just six days before his death, it was reported that Prince’s plane had to make an emergency landing in Moline, IL, to rush him to the hospital for “flu symptoms.” It soon came out that he was allegedly unconscious after a Percocet overdose and his bodyguard was seen carrying his body off the plane as the EMT’s rushed over and gave Prince a ‘save shot’…a shot used to instantly reverse the effects of certain types of drug overdoses…

Like we always say, celebrities accomplished a level of greatness, but they aren’t perfect. They are simply perfectly flawed human beings, just like the rest of us. That doesn’t automatically make them bad people, it simply makes them human. Rest on Prince, we still love you.