From the New York Daily News
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BY MICHAEL O'KEEFFE
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Wednesday, October 3rd 2007, 10:52 AM
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Kimberly Bell will be featured in the November issue of Playboy.
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In the days before he became violent, in the days before he threatened to chop off Kimberly Bell's head and leave her body in a ditch, Barry Bonds would stand in front of a mirror and fret about how steroids were changing his body.
His body had grown thicker, his back was pocked with acne, his hair had fallen out and his testicles had shriveled when Bonds asked his former mistress if she thought anyone would suspect he was on the juice.
"Do I look bloated?" Bonds wanted to know. "Does it look funny? Do you think this is obvious?"
It sure did, Bell told the Daily News during a wide-ranging interview to promote her six-page nude pictorial and in-depth article in the November issue of Playboy, which goes on sale at newsstands on Friday.
But nobody - Major League Baseball officials, San Francisco Giants' brass, teammates or even trainers - ever challenged the home run king.
"I don't see how anyone could not have known, but everybody looked the other way," said Bell, who claims the slugger admitted using the juice to her in 1999. "He surrounds himself with yes people. I don't think he ever considered where this would lead, and as long as he was selling tickets, the Giants were going to cater to him."
Bell catered to Bonds, too: She tells Playboy he was no All-Star in the bedroom. "When you're dealing with somebody who's that selfish, with that kind of ego, you learn to exaggerate your reactions to make him feel better," she said, or as the skin mag put it, she faked it.
Their sex life really slumped, however, when Bonds started taking steroids, driven by jealousy after Mark McGwire began receiving piles of press for his pursuit of Roger Maris' single-season home run record. Bell told Playboy that Bonds suffered from sexual dysfunction, one side effect of steroid use. He tried Viagra several times but didn't like it because it affected his vision and stuffed up his nose.
Bell says she fell in love with a lean, charismatic Bonds in 1994. She was young and single, he was divorcing his first wife, and both had emotional wounds from their childhoods. Bell grew up without her father; Bonds' dad, former Yankee Bobby Bonds, was emotionally distant. She offered Bonds a sounding board, a shoulder to lean on when the pressures of superstardom became too great. He became a father figure, a big, strapping protector.
The relationship started to sour, she says, after Bonds started using performance-enhancing drugs. "(Trainer Greg) Anderson was always at spring training with us, everywhere we went. Barry used to have a little satchel, and in the mornings he would say 'Hey, I need to go talk with Greg.' They'd grab the satchel and go into a room, and then I'd hear the door lock."
Bonds was always moody - "I always figured he had PMS, like a woman," Bell said – but the drugs radically changed his behavior as well as his body. He became a different person, controlling, threatening and finally violent.
"It went from 'I want to know where you are at' to 'I'm gonna f------ kill you. I'm gonna cut your head off and leave you in a ditch.'"
She last saw Bonds in 2003, right before federal agents raided BALCO and arrested Anderson and others.
Bell said she agreed to the Playboy story and the nude photos because she has been erroneously characterized in the press: She is not a gold digger.
"A lot of people have said a lot of rotten things about me," she said. "It comes to a point where you have to defend yourself."
Bell said she had a successful career in graphic design during most of the nine years she was with Bonds; the controversial slugger did not lavish her with gifts or pay her bills. She lived in a studio apartment for the first eight years of their relationship. He did buy her a home in Scottsdale, Ariz., near the end of their relationship, and gave her tens of thousands of dollars for the house. But he stopped making house payments as promised.
The photo shoot, she adds, "was an amazing experience. It's tasteful - they are not sleazy in any way at Playboy. Why not do the pictures? I'm 37 years old and they made me feel beautiful."
Bell says she hopes to return to college to get a degree in education. She'd like to teach middle school kids. "It's a noble profession. It's a way to inspire children."
She's also working on a book, but this won't be a tell-all tale. Instead, it's a self-help book for young women who become involved with rich and powerful men.
"It will be about choices and consequences," she said, "and about how my life got off track."