Image via WENN
Two years ago, famed producer and mogul Dr. Dre issued an apology to the “women he’d hurt.” He didn’t name names. But after the Straight Outta Compton biopic failed to mention his abuse Michel’le, the mother of his child, or the more publicized abuse of journalist Dee Barnes, Barnes wrote an article about the incident that completely changed the conversation.
Now, in a new documentary, Defiant Ones, currently airing on HBO, Dre is speaking about the incident again.
The headlines for this story mostly note that Dre is apologizing for the attacks. And while he does use the words sorry and apologize, the conversation is moreso about where he was when he was behaving this way and how it’s something he had to reckon with in terms of legacy.
“Any man that puts his hands on a female, is a f*cking idiot. He’s out of his f*cking mind. And I was out of my f*cking mind at the time. I f*cked up. I paid for it. I’m sorry for it. I apologize for it. I have this dark cloud that follows me and it’s going to be attached to me forever. It’s a major blemish on who I am as a man.”
What a lot of the articles today are failing to report is that Allen Hughes, the director of the documentary, in a June interview with “Sway in the Morning,” said that Barnes herself was going to appear in the documentary.
Hughes even goes further saying that if Dre hadn’t apologized
“What’s odd is remember when Straight Outta Compton came out and this thing blew up with Dee Barnes and she wrote the Gawker piece? We had already had the apology in the can for a year and it was so surreal because I was like ‘Damn, what are you going to tell people that Dre already dealt with this, opened up about it. We had to sit on it for another two years and we had to deal with it.”
While it is interesting that he did talk about this before the biopic was released, most of us don’t get to decided when we’ll have to atone for our past indiscretions.
I really do appreciate the fact that Dee Barnes was asked to participate in this film. For that reason alone,
I’ll watch to see what he has to say.
What people are really wondering though is if this acknowledgment of his wrongs will include at least a mention of his longtime girlfriend and mother of his son, Michel’le. According to her biopic, the abuse wasn’t at one time thing, like the Barnes incident. It was consistent and often fueled by his abuse of alcohol.
It’ll be interesting to see how deep this goes in the documentary.
Defiant Ones, the four-part doc, was released on HBO on July 9. You can watch it on HBO Go and HBO Now. For more information, click here.
The post Dr. Dre And Dee Barnes Talk Domestic Abuse In Defiant Ones Documentary appeared first on MadameNoire.