Revealed: The forbidden secret marriage of this 1980s popstar to an Arab Princess who ‘vanished without a trace’

A Saturday morning in the late 1980s and teenagers are laying siege to a pop star’s Berkshire mansion. When their patience is rewarded, they emit a piercing shriek.

Stedman Pearson, enjoying fame and fortune as one-fifth of the sibling group Five Star, saunters to the end of the driveway to sign autographs. 

As ever, he is courteous and friendly. Some fans have travelled far. 

Another, Hessah, 16, is practically a neighbour. 

The fans are much taken with the glamour of the setting and gaze through gold-painted iron gates at the house, Stone Court, taking in the Lamborghinis and Ferraris littering the drive.

Hessah is unmoved by wealth and its trappings. For though she is too polite to tell the other girls, her father is the ruler of Dubai – and one of the richest men in the world.

Hessah loves only the music, though she has a soft spot for Stedman, and they spend minutes chatting. 

Thus began an extraordinary relationship between the pop star and the princess, a modern fairy tale of palaces, plots, secret trysts and a forbidden love ultimately thwarted by an unbridgeable cultural divide.

Hessah was unmoved by wealth and its trappings. For though she is too polite to tell the other girls, her father is the ruler of Dubai – and one of the richest men in the world. Pictured: Princess Hessah in 2006

Stedman Pearson (left) with his sisters and brothers as one-fifth of the sibling group Five Star

When Stedman died last month aged 60 of complications from diabetes while having blood dialysis, there were tributes from across the entertainment world.

 Fans also mourned. 

Teenage passions dissolve as quickly as they surface but the girls who gathered outside his gate nearly four decades ago – middle-aged women now – likely experienced a painful stab of nostalgia at the news.

To Hessah, it must have felt like a dagger through the heart. 

Their relationship was closely hidden for nearly four decades but The Mail on Sunday has interviewed close friends and associates of the couple and can today reveal that Stedman and Hessah – Sheikha Hessah Al Maktoum to use her proper title – secretly married on July 13, 1994.

The wedding took place not amid Emirati royal splendour but in Orange County civil court on a corner of a busy road in Orlando, Florida. 

He was 30, she 22. Later they went through another ceremony at Haringey register office in north London.

None of their friends or family attended either service. So secretive were the couple they felt they couldn’t live together. It was imperative that Hessah’s family never found out. 

She knew they would not approve and her fears on how the ruling dynasty pulls into line its wayward princesses were confirmed years later by a spate of suspected abductions.

Hessah and Stedman maintained their deception for 15 years. Eventually, though, as Hessah feared, her family discovered the truth. Pictured: Sheikah Hassah Maktoum

At their peak, Five Star, with their big shoulder pads and slicked back hair, were huge. They had six top-ten singles including Rain Or Shine and System Addict, sold more than 15 million records, played six sold-out shows at Wembley Arena and were the first black group to win a Brit Award

Hessah and Stedman maintained their deception for 15 years. Eventually, though, as Hessah feared, her family discovered the truth.

At the time, top London lawyers were helping her switch her assets from Dubai to the UK and put a plan in place to protect the couple ‘physically’. 

A date, January 25, 2009 – the couple’s lawyers called it D-Day – was set for a bombshell public announcement.

Finally, she and Stedman would be free to live together openly. Yet D-Day never came. 

Friends of the couple say that just when she was on the verge of freedom, Hessah ‘suddenly vanished’ from Britain.

A friend says: ‘They loved each other deeply. They were doves together. For a long time it was blissful and then this dark thing happened. Hessah was wrenched away from him. 

Stedman was inconsolable. To this day I don’t know what happened to her. She was so beautiful, a wonderful person. I assume she was taken to Dubai, that’s what happens – right?’

At their peak, Five Star, with their big shoulder pads and slicked back hair, were huge. They had six top-ten singles including Rain Or Shine and System Addict, sold more than 15 million records, played six sold-out shows at Wembley Arena and were the first black group to win a Brit Award.

When Stedman died last month aged 60 of complications from diabetes while having blood dialysis, there were tributes from across the entertainment world

They cracked America, winning a Grammy nomination. A few years earlier they were in a £70,000 terraced house in Romford, east London, where they grew up.

Like The Jackson 5, Five Star – Stedman, his sisters Deniece, Doris and Lorraine and brother Delroy – were managed by their father, Buster Pearson, a musician who played with Otis Redding.

Lorraine once said: ‘We didn’t have many friends. We missed going to parties. My parents were very protective. 

‘Friends could never come in. Living together, working together, was hard.’

Hessah knew all about life in a gilded cage. Still, while she lived half the year at the Dubai royal court, the rest was spent in England, which she found enchanting, at her family’s house in Windlesham, a few miles from Stone Court, and at a vast penthouse in South Kensington.

Her father, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the eldest of the fabulously wealthy Maktoum brothers, had presided over the transformation of the United Arab Emirates into a thriving modern state. In Britain, he was synonymous with horse racing and was occasionally seen with the late Queen at Ascot. 

As a co-owner of the renowned Godolphin stables, he had a host of big-race winners.

Hessah didn’t much care for horse racing, but she loved pop music – and Five Star in particular.

Stedman Pearson pictured with his siblings and fellow Five Star bandmates Lorraine Pearson, Denise Pearson, Doris Pearson and Delroy Pearson 

 ‘She lived nearby, and she got to know Stedman by chatting to him at the gate,’ said another friend.

Over time their friendship turned to romance, surviving Five Star’s move to Los Angeles in 1990.

The group failed to build on their success and tensions arose. The siblings started to push back, wanting independence. 

For Hessah, independence was an impossible dream. What also might seem impossible – certainly improbable – is the relationship itself.

While Stedman had a flamboyant taste in fashion and was comfortable wearing make-up, those close to him insist he was not gay.

The couple’s union was seemingly genuine, though little evidence survives. Except, thats is, for two significant documents unearthed by this newspaper on both sides of the Atlantic. 

How fitting that the princess and the pop star should first exchange vows in the home of Disney World. 

On the Orlando marriage certificate their names appear above the heading: ‘We’re United in Holy Matrimony.’ Elsewhere, Hessah’s birthplace is simply listed as ‘Middle East’.

A friend says: ‘Getting married was reckless. They were two people from different cultures. 

She was a royal marrying without her family’s blessing. Only in hindsight do you realise she must have been so frightened for them both.’

How frequently they saw each other in the US is unclear. But it seems by 1996 Stedman had returned to England, where the couple began to settle into a bizarre form of married life. 

Living together was out of the question. Shadowed by a security team, Hessah’s movements were monitored, so the couple had to pretend to be friends.

Another marriage certificate found by our reporters revealed that by September 1996 Stedman had changed his name by deed poll to Farris Mohammed. 

Friends believe this was possibly a way of making their union more palatable to Hessah’s family.

Hessah is listed on the Haringey certificate as a ‘student/artist’ and it gives her address not at the South Kensington penthouse but a modest flat in Camberley, Surrey.

This was bought by a friend, Soraya, described as a ‘lady-in-waiting figure’ whom Hessah called ‘auntie’, who was tasked with secretly aiding a permanent move to London. 

Pictured: Hessah’s uncle Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum in 2019

The certificate adds: ‘Previously went through a form of marriage at Orlando, Florida, on 13th July 1994’.

Stedman began introducing Hessah to his inner circle of friends. One of them recalls: ‘After I’d met Hessah a few times I said to Stedman, “Who’s this?” He said, “That’s my wife, but nobody knows’.”

Another friend adds: ‘For six months of the year Hessah relished the relative freedom of London, even though she was under heavy scrutiny. Going to the cinema, but most of all going to nightclubs with Stedman and dancing.

‘Hessah led a double life. She went home to be a good princess and then came here for six months and had a party with people she loved. 

She wore Western clothes and was stunning, with beautiful long dark hair and beautiful features. But she hated everything about being a princess.’

Friends say Stedman was unerring in his ability to assuage Hessah’s fears about the future. 

In turn, she was supportive of him – never more than in 2007 when his relationship with Buster broke down. Stedman told police he had death threats from his father.

Next year, two years after her father died, Hessah and Stedman decided keeping their marriage secret was no longer realistic. 

They felt they had to act when Stedman referred to himself as married when he was on a reality TV show. His managers tried to prevent the clip being aired due to a ‘national security issue’.

Friends say Stedman was unerring in his ability to assuage Hessah’s fears about the future. Pictured: Stedman and Denise Pearson in 2011

The couple then hired a top London law firm to help protect Hessah’s assets – including millions in a Dubai bank and 25 properties – from being seized by her family.

She was under no illusion that after D-Day she would be cut off. 

Her millions meant nothing to her family – by this time her Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum had succeeded her father – but lawyers told Hessah her relatives wouldn’t want her to be seen ‘escaping with all her assets’.

A source says: ‘There was a sense this would be seen as a betrayal and send the wrong message to others at the royal court who might try something similar.’

Friends said a plan was made to physically protect the couple and handle the announcement in a way that reduced what lawyers called the possibility of an ‘extreme hostile reaction’ from her family.

Before the planned announcement, Hessah resolved to speak to her family about her marriage but only after she was certain her assets were beyond their reach.

She never got the chance – at least not in the way she envisaged.

‘She disappeared,’ says a friend of Stedman. ‘She got pulled back to Dubai, I guess. We tried to help Stedman find out what happened, even raising a missing person report.

Like The Jackson 5, Five Star – Stedman, his sisters Deniece, Doris and Lorraine and brother Delroy – were managed by their father, Buster Pearson, a musician who played with Otis Redding

‘But it got nowhere. Police said to stand down and her security people said she was gone and there was nothing to be done about it.

‘A week or so later, I heard Stedman went into hiding. He did not answer any calls, just disappeared. 

‘He pulled out of everything. He was so heartbroken. When he did resurface, I never saw him again. It wasn’t the same. I know he kept pictures of her on his mantelpiece. He was a lovely guy, one of life’s gentlemen. I’m so upset he’s gone.’

These days, while Dubai espouses gender equality, troubling stories continue to emerge of its princesses fleeing fathers’ control. 

Nobody interviewed by this newspaper was able to say with any clarity what became of Hessah. 

It must be said that no hard evidence exists to suggest she was forcibly returned to the desert kingdom.

In 2020, a High Court judge in London found that Hessah’s uncle and current emir, Sheikh Mohammed, was responsible for the abduction and forced return of two of his daughters.

Sheikha Shamsa fled the family’s UK estate in Surrey in 2000 but was later abducted in Cambridgeshire by agents of the sheikh and forcibly returned to Dubai where she remains in captivity.

Sheikha Latifa (pictured) made two unsuccessful attempts to flee her father’s family, in 2002 and 2018 

A request by Cambridgeshire Police to visit Dubai to investigate was refused. 

Sheikha Latifa, meanwhile, made two unsuccessful attempts to flee her father’s family, in 2002 and 2018.

After the first, she was imprisoned by her father in Dubai for over three years. In the second attempt she was abducted at sea off the Indian coast and forcibly returned to Dubai, where she remains under house arrest.

The judge said Latifa’s allegations of serious physical abuse amounting to torture, made in a public video, were credible – and found ‘these two young women are deprived of their liberty’.

The Mail on Sunday traced Hessah’s friend Soraya, aged 79, to Pakistan where she now lives. If anyone could solve the mystery of what happened to Hessah it was her ‘lady-in-waiting’.

‘I used to work for her but that was a long time ago,’ she said. ‘I resigned. I am not in touch with them. She must be in Dubai.’

Friends of Stedman, meanwhile, say a TV documentary about his life is planned, and there is also interest in an unreleased solo album, featuring backing vocals from Hessah on six tracks.

‘She has a hauntingly beautiful voice,’ said a friend.

‘It is the most tangible evidence of their time together – the pop star and his beautiful Arab wife singing together on an album.’