Ex-Bonds mistress dishes on steroids, life with Barry

Kimberly Bell says she had a nine-year relationship with Barry Bonds that began when the slugger was single. Photo courtesy of Playboy

The media tour took her earlier in the day to The Howard Stern Show, where the subject of performance enhancement centered on the bedroom as opposed to the baseball field. Inside Edition and Reuters filled the bill on the previous afternoon. Geraldo was scheduled for the weekend. This is Kimberly Bell's life for the moment, a minor figure in a major story about baseball and steroids. For Bell, though, it is a much smaller tale. It is the story of woman who fell in love with the wrong man: Barry Bonds.

"This wasn't a weekend fling," she says. "This was a nine-year relationship. This was someone that I loved and somebody that loved me. I was a confidant to him, a sounding board to all his moans and gripes about baseball. A lot of people want to portray me as his mistress. He was single when I met him. He brought me home to his parents and his family. I was around his children, his friends, his family, his attorney, [Giants manager] Dusty Baker. Everybody knew who I was. None of this was secret."

She is talking in advance of a six-page Playboy pictorial which breaks on newsstands Friday. The accompanying story in the November issue details her life in and out of the bedroom with the scarlet-lettered home run king. A Playboy-sponsored media tour might not be the choice platform for telling her side of the story; still, she offers a compelling portrait. As she sits in a Midtown Manhattan conference room more than 30 floors above Radio City Music Hall, Bell is unaware that news has just broken of Marion Jones, another graduate of the College of BALCO, admitting steroid use prior to the 2000 Olympics. "Choices and consequences," Bell says, repeatedly, when asked what precisely she wants to convey to the public.

Throughout the interview Bell repeats that she is not a gold digger. "I had a great job," she says. "I had my own stuff. I come from humble beginnings. I didn't wear designer clothes. I wasn't a dress-up kind of girl."

The relationship started in July 1994, after Bell met Bonds in the parking lot of Candlestick Park following a Giants game. "I had met this girl just two weeks before meeting Barry," she says. "We hung out a little bit and one day she said, 'I'm going to take you to the Giants game.' She knew Barry. After the game she drives to the other side of the ballpark, into the players' parking lot. This guy comes running out in street clothes whom I later learned was Barry. He leans into the car, sees me in the back seat, smiled and says, 'You're going to be mine.' I was blushing. I'm 24 and thinking, Wow, who is this guy? He's charismatic, big dimples, a great big smile, really friendly."

Bell says Bonds invited her the next day to a Fourth of July barbeque. He showed up with former teammate Bobby Bonilla and soon took Bell for a ride in his new Porsche. "We were going 100 miles down the [Highway] 101 and he was saying, 'Just trust me. Just trust me,' she says. "I kept thinking he was going to crash and there would be these headlines that he's dead and there was just this girl in the car."

The girl became his lover and over the years, according to Bell, the slugger's frame morphed from a "lean, cut physique" to that of a muscle-bound "linebacker." Did she notice changes in his physique and temperament? "Absolutely," she says. "You're with someone in an intimate way and you know their body and figure. For a man, you would notice if your wife's breasts were a lot larger or smaller than normal. He had the acne on the back. It wasn't like a carpet that covered it from the bottom to the top, but a man at that age does not suddenly have these breakouts all over the place. There was bloating. His face shape changed. He would stand in front of mirror with me in the bathroom and say, 'Oh, God, do I look bloated? I've gotten bigger since last year. How obvious is it?'"

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