Alfie Karmal (the son of a Palestinian father and Greek mother) was ten years older than Mills when they met in 1986, while she was working as a waitress at the Bananas cocktail club in Wardour Street, London. Karmal bought her new clothes, Cartier jewellery and paid for cosmetic surgery when she complained that her breasts were sagging. She reached the final of the Cinzano Model of the Year Competition, so Karmal, who had moved into the computer industry, set up a model agency for her, ExSell Management, although it was not successful. Mills later tried to sell it for £5,000 but could not find a buyer. In 1987 Mills went to live in Paris, telling Karmal that a cosmetics company had given her a modelling contract, but became the mistress of millionaire Lebanese businessman George Kazan for two years and took part in a photo session for a stills-only German sex education manual called Die Freuden der Liebe (The Joys of Love), in which she was photographed explicitly simulating sex with an equally nude male model called Peter Wilson. She received about £150 for the session.
After returning to London, Mills asked Karmal to marry her. Karmal said yes, but on one condition: "I told her I couldn`t marry her until she did something about her compulsive lying, and she agreed to see a psychiatrist for eight weeks. She admitted she had a problem and said it was because she`d been forced to lie as a child by her father." Mills had told Karmal that she had a driving licence, and three A-levels, which Karmal later learned was not true. On 6 May 1989, Mills married Karmal (who had two sons from a previous marriage) and moved into a four-bedroom house in Dobbs Weir, Hertfordshire. Although Mills proposed to Karmal, she later said that every man she has been out with "has asked me to marry him within a week." While married to Karmal, she suffered two ectopic pregnancies, so Karmal paid for her to go on holiday to Croatia with his children and ex-wife (with whom Mills had become friends) in 1990, but Mills ended up living with her ski instructor, Pogacar, shortly before the Croatian War began. Mills then set up a refugee crisis centre in London, helping over 20 people to escape the war. She drove by herself to deliver donations to Croatia, taking modelling assignments in Austria on the way to pay for the trip. Karmal and Mills were divorced in 1991, and Karmal now lives in Vancouver, Canada.