Glamorous and smiling in the stands, American model Ashlyn Castro became a familiar face as she cheered on handsome Three Lions superstar Jude Bellingham at the World Cup this summer, enjoying life as half of one of the planet’s most enviable couples.
The pair later posted pictures of tender moments on the beach during a romantic post-tournament holiday to Hawaii, and were seen last week at Alton Towers.
But in July 2024, the social media influencer, 28, who Jude refers to as ‘my love’, looked the picture of despair as she described to police how her ‘schizophrenic’ mother had assaulted her.
‘I’ve just been attacked by my mom,’ she says haltingly to an officer, in never-before-seen police bodycam footage obtained by The Mail on Sunday.
The scene is a hotel car park in Henderson, Nevada, near Las Vegas where her mother Tina, then 59, was living on the streets.
In between sobs as she fights to control her emotions, Ashlyn explains that she’d wanted to drive her mum, who is ‘off her meds’, back to California to ‘figure something out for her’. But as she and Tina sat in the parked car, Ashlyn realised she’d booked the wrong hotel for her mother.
Then Tina lashed out. ‘She pulled my hair down and started punching my face,’ Ashlyn says, struggling to catch her breath.
‘I’ve just been attacked by my mom,’ Ashlyn says haltingly to an officer, in never-before-seen police bodycam footage obtained by The Mail on Sunday
The scene is a hotel car park in Henderson, Nevada, where her mother Tina was living on the streets. Tina is being questioned by two other officers
Tina, the footage shows, is at this point at the other end of the car park being questioned by two other officers. Gaunt and confused, she too sobs as she gives her version of events, insisting that it was Ashlyn who’d attacked her. ‘She hates me for some reason, I never did anything to her,’ she insists.
But it is clear who police believe. Tina is asked to turn around to be handcuffed – their judgment helped by a video Ashlyn took, and the bloody scratches to her hands and a swollen lip.
‘A busted lip?’ Tina protests. ‘I never touched her lip!’
A subsequent statement Ashlyn gave to police, seen by the MoS, was written with the weariness of someone who has long endured such erratic outbursts. It simply read: ‘I was trying to get my mother a hotel room when she started attacking me, pulling my hair, punching me, scratching me. She didn’t think I was getting her the room so she attacked me.’
Tina was fined $200 (£150) for domestic battery but is now wanted for contempt of court after failing to pay the fee.
It was just a few months after this ugly scene that Ashlyn met England midfielder Jude, who she last year described as ‘the most thoughtful, kind-hearted, hard-working, incredible human I have ever known’.
But if she thought that blossoming love would help distract her from old familial rifts, their relationship seems, in fact, to have stoked the feud further.
‘Who is this Jude Bellingham?’ Tina raged at her daughter on TikTok. ‘You disobeyed your mum, lied about her, left her in shelters.’ Ashlyn responded by revealing to her followers her mother’s mental illness. It is thought that Tina is currently living in a homeless shelter in Los Angeles.
But, as with all family dynamics, the row is far from clear-cut. For years, Tina herself was the victim of domestic violence at the hands of Ashlyn’s father Michael. It was a toxic marriage that Tina fled in 2000 with Ashlyn and her brother Trever when they were just three and five years old.
The family moved in with Tina’s mother Lynn, now 80, whose modest, single-storey house in Anaheim, California, became Ashlyn’s home. There, Tina filed for a restraining order against Michael, to whom she had been married for eight years, claiming he was physically and verbally abusive and he suffered from bipolar disorder.
Glamorous American model Ashlyn Castro became a familiar face as she cheered on Three Lions superstar Jude Bellingham at the World Cup
The handwritten statement seeking the order is a heartbreaking window into Ashlyn’s chaotic childhood as much as her mother’s marriage. ‘I left him and he came to my parents’ house where I was staying and busted out all the windows on my car,’ Tina pleaded with the judge. ‘He had taken a whole handful of pills. I told him he needed help for his depression but never did he seek help.’
When Tina told him she was leaving and taking Ashlyn and Trever, she wrote: ‘He said he was going to get something to eat. My husband was taking a long time coming back so I looked in the garage and he was sitting in the car with the door closed and car running and was drinking and had taken some pills.
‘I decided to leave for good this time and I am staying at my parents’ with my children. He calls me every day and night threatening to kill himself… and shows up at my parents’ house screaming at me in front of my kids.’
In an exclusive interview with the MoS, Ashlyn’s brother Trever said both parents had issues – their mother with schizophrenia and their father with depression.
Michael sought treatment and rebuilt his life after divorcing Tina and ran several successful businesses until his death in 2021 from Covid, but Tina continues to have ‘serious problems’. Trever says: ‘It’s been horrible, traumatising. It’s affected every part of our lives. When I was little I don’t remember a lot. Our parents got divorced when we were young. It was a brutal divorce. Both our parents weren’t the best back then.’
Trever, 30, is a father of four, and still lives in the childhood home in Anaheim. Set in a solidly working-class suburb, the 1955 three-bedroom house is close to a noisy motorway.
A couple of miles away is Disneyland, where Ashlyn and Jude were photographed at the Star Wars ride days after England’s last World Cup game.
Billed as the ‘happiest place on Earth’, the theme park must have felt a world away from her childhood just down the road. On the doorstep of Trever’s home, amid the toys strewn across the front lawn next to plastic garden furniture, he explains that his mother was once placed under a conservatorship, which gave his uncle, a police captain, legal authority over her. But when that ended – and Tina stopped taking her medication – she plunged into crisis.
Influencer Ashlyn’s ascent from Anaheim to the superstar milieu of private jets and million-dollar mansions has been remarkable
He says that neither he nor Ashlyn can force their mother to get medical help. ‘Unless somebody is a danger to themselves or others it is virtually impossible to force them into treatment. We’re kind of at a standstill,’ he said.
Tina’s social media posts show her moving from halfway houses to homeless shelters in the company of her small black dog, Speedy. She often wears a crucifix around her neck and claims to have ‘found God’.
In one picture, she appears to be inside a tent in MacArthur Park close to downtown LA. Hardly the image of beauty portrayed in the 1968 Richard Harris song, the park is now home to scores of drug addicts – some of whom were openly using syringes when the MoS visited last week. Perhaps, then, Tina’s envy at her daughter’s new life on the arm of a multi-millionaire Real Madrid footballer is not surprising.
Ashlyn’s ascent from Anaheim to the superstar milieu of private jets and million-dollar mansions has been remarkable.
When in her 2024 witness statement she described herself as ‘self-employed’, she had already launched her own talent agency The Four Models and had appeared in the music video for Popstar, the 2021 track from record producer DJ Khaled.
Today, she has lucrative deals with beauty giants such as Clarins.
It is perhaps that entrepreneurial steel that has won her the approval of Jude’s fiercely protective mother, Denise, at whose side Ashlyn was regularly seen during the World Cup.
Nicknamed ‘The Queen’, Denise with her ex-husband Mark, a retired police officer, gave Jude the loving and stable upbringing that has shaped him and his younger brother Jobe, 20, into such gifted footballers.
It was a childhood that could not have been more different from Ashlyn’s. But her relationship with Jude is not the first time she’s been linked to an eligible sports star.
During the World Cup, Bellingham ran into the stands after England games to embrace his girlfriend, who would usually be sitting beside his mother Denise, behind
Ashlyn is rumoured to have dated US basketball players Terance Mann and LaMelo Ball, as well as Oscar-winning Sinners actor Michael B. Jordan.
She met Jude – some say on the celebrity dating site Raya – at the end of 2024 when the pair started posting on each other’s Instagram accounts. In January 2025, they were photographed having lunch in Madrid, and the relationship has become increasingly public since.
Last September, they were seen kissing on a £1million superyacht in Sardinia.
Ashlyn maintains a home in Los Angeles but spends more of her time with Jude at his £5.5million mansion in the Spanish capital’s exclusive La Finca neighbourhood.
During the World Cup, he ran into the stands after England games to embrace his girlfriend, who would usually be found sitting beside his mother.
But not everyone has been as approving of Ashlyn as the Bellingham ‘Queen’. A common accusation flung Ashlyn’s way is that she is a ‘gold digger’, something she has addressed head-on in a social media post.
‘It makes me super uncomfortable talking on camera about my personal life,’ she began. ‘Every angle you can think of, people have attacked me, harassed me, been so disrespectful. It’s just been too much.
‘I’ve had three boyfriends over the last eight years. In 2017, I was in my very first relationship and he’s a public figure so because of that I’ve dealt with people talking about me, making up things about me. There was nothing on the internet about me prior, so people… made up a bunch of things to justify hating me.’
Speaking about her mother’s illness she said: ‘This is extremely personal. This is my real life. I lost my father a few years ago.
‘My mum is mentally ill… moving forward, I will talk about things that are important such as mental health. This is something that I wanted to use my platform for but I just wasn’t ready.’
Ashlyn is planning to start a charity to help those suffering from mental health issues and to support their loved ones. She said: ‘It’s the most defeated feeling in the world. If you can’t relate then consider yourself blessed.’
Ashyln Castro has been approached for comment.
Additional reporting by Daniel Bates and Peter Sheridan
You must be logged in to post a comment Login