Rita accuses Bob of rape in new biography

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New York Daily News

Marley's wife: He raped me

The widow of reggae legend Bob Marley is claiming the pacifist icon once raped her.

Rita Marley says that in 1973, seven years after she and the "One Love" singer were married, she was withholding sex to punish him for his many infidelities.

"Bob wouldn't take 'no' for an answer," Rita, 57 and a singer herself, tells Britain's Daily Mirror. "He said to me, 'No, you're my wife and you're supposed to.' So he forced himself on me, and I call that rape."

How dare she tarnish his good name. Unless, of course, it's the truth.

She adds, "I think that's when I got pregnant again."

The couple's third child, Stephanie, was born in 1974.

Rita made the allegation while promoting her memoir, "No Woman, No Cry."

A rep for her publisher, Hyperion, told us Rita writes in her book (due out May 5) that he "almost" raped her.

But Rita was more emphatic in the interview, saying: "Afterwards I felt so terrible.

I screamed at him, 'I hate you, I hate you!'

"I considered divorcing him many times ... especially when he started [to] bring back the babies of women he'd got pregnant."

She writes that some of those infants were conceived under her own roof.

Still, she says, she befriended some of his mistresses.

Marley died of cancer in 1981 at age 36.