The 18-year-old star took the astonishing step of ringing this newspaper after we started making enquiries about rumours circulating in Hollywood that she had split from her boyfriend of 18 months, record producer Beau Dozier.

Speaking from New York after celebrating last week's Thanksgiving holiday alone, Joss said: "I still love Beau more than anything and always will.

"People want to read all sorts of scenarios into it and people are saying all sorts of things. But the truth is, it was simple. I am a normal girl, I had a boyfriend and I no longer have a boyfriend."

Joss's emotional outburst came after she was seen in America - where she has spent the best part of the year supporting the Rolling Stones on tour - without the diamond "friendship ring" Beau gave her.

The couple had been inseparable since they met when Beau, son of famed Motown songwriter Lamont Dozier, worked with her on her platinum-selling Mind, Body And Soul album.

Joss, then 17, faced a huge backlash in America, where she was the £1.5million "face" of Gap jeans, after moving in with her 25-year-old lover this year.

Under Californian law, she was under age - the legal age for consensual sex is 18 - and Gap dumped her when the internet lit up with complaints from her fans, who demanded that Beau should be charged with statutory rape.

"And I can't even blame it on the long-distance thing. I have a hectic schedule and so has Beau, but I have a philosophical outlook. If it was meant to be, we would still be together. I am very young and we just grew apart. It was a mutual decision."

Rumours have been circulating for weeks that Joss's record label bosses - and her family - were unhappy that her "squeaky-clean" image had been compromised by her love affair.

Since Joss moved from her parent's 200-year-old cottage in the Devon village of Ashill into her lover's luxurious villa in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino, her "handlers" have been worried about how her 'innocent' image might be affected by her highprofile love affair.

"But while America is considered a free society, in reality it is very repressed. Her fans, and more importantly, their mothers, did not like the fact that she was having under-age sex with an older man. It cost her the Gap job and now it has probably cost her the relationship.

A neighbour who lives next to Beau's £1.2 million home said: "He was here last weekend and looked devastated. Joss may say it is a mutual decision, but he looked very much like a guy who had been dumped."

Another friend added: "Beau gave Joss a diamond friendship ring, which in America is the first step in the lead-up to an engagement. Their relationship was real. She was besotted with him, but people are saying it was her who broke things off. She is still very young and the controversy over their relationship destroyed it."

In the interview she says they are committed to each other, but admits: "Sometimes we can have arguments about nothing and then not speak to each other for three days."

Last night she said: "The reason we split is because we realised, after two years, that the relationship had become a friendship more than anything else.

"I wanted to talk to The Mail on Sunday because I want people to know the truth and hear my side of it, from me. I think that it's important to tell the truth and move on."

You've got to be kidding! In the US her relationship has barely been mentioned. A scandal? I don't think so. The only place I've read about this so called "scandal" was in the British press. I'm an American and if I didn't read it in the British press I wouldn't have even known about it.

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