Jimmie Allen considered suicide after he was accused of sexual assault

Speaking to Kathie Lee Gifford in a video shared to YouTube, Jimmie said about being dropped by his record label and losing various business deals: "The first thing my brain goes to is not the career. It's, how am I going to provide for my kids? I had three [kids] then.

"I'm thinking to myself, how am I going to provide for my family? And then it hit me. My life insurance covered suicide.

"I don't feel that way now, but in that moment, when you feel like you have nothing... In the midst of a society where it's no longer innocent until proven guilty... She said this so it must be true."

Jimmie got as far as putting bullets in his gun clip while feeling "heartbroken" about the lawsuit, but as he put the last one in, he received a message from his friend Chuck Adams, which was "freaky" because he didn't usually receive alerts for texts.

Jimmie recalled: "He said, 'Ending it isn't the answer.' And when I read those words that he texted me, I read them again. I just stopped.

"I remember I called one of my buddies that lived in lower Delaware. He came up. I gave him my gun. I said, 'Take it. I don't need it.'"

The 'Make Me Want To' singer - who has Aadyn, nine, from a previous relationship, Naomi, four, Zara, two, and Cohen, six months, with wife Alexis, and twins Amari and Aria, who were born to a friend named Danielle last summer - was "able to get through" the "rough" day but spent some time feeling low.

He recalled: "Every single day I remember battling, 'Do I want to live? Do I not want to live?' I'm like, 'Man, my family would have X amount of dollars if I would've [taken] care of something. But I realised that's not the way to do it."

Jimmie briefly turned to drugs but is now sober and "in a great place", having eventually gone to a retreat and beginning therapy.

He said: "I am healing and growing for me and my children."

The singer has denied the allegations against him and in the new interview said he and his manager had been "hooking up" and he was left "confused and heartbroken" when she filed her lawsuit.

It was revealed last month that Jimmie's former manager had entered a settlement agreement with him to "avoid the trauma of reliving her abuse over the course of a painful trial."

The alleged victim's lawyer, Elizabeth Fegan, said in a statement: "The lawsuit against Allen was never about financial gain for my client, but instead holding Allen accountable.

"Unfortunately, civil litigation has few ways to punish wrongdoers; we could not ask the court to jail him, for example, or force him to change his behaviour. One of the few remedies we do have in civil litigation is to ask the court to punish through monetary damages, which we did.

"While Allen and my client reached an agreement prior to trial, the motivations remained true - to hold Allen accountable, which we succeeded in doing.

"My client stands by her statements in the complaint, that Allen raped her while she was incapacitated and sexually abused her while she was his day-to-day manger."