3. Michel’le
Michel’le was all of 16 years old when she recorded vocals for the song “Turn Off the Lights” by World Class Wreckin Cru—which was later ripped off by Master P on the hilariously awful “Ice Cream Man.” Because people might get the wrong idea about me if I suggested otherwise, I’m gonna have to insist that this was inappropriate.
It wouldn’t be the only inappropriate thing to happen to Michel’le.
Michel’le eventually became an adult, but she still has the speaking voice of an eight-year-old, which, again . . . I will refrain from discussing any potential implications. You might remember her from songs like “Nicety” and “No More Lies,” both produced by Dr. Dre, with whom she was in a relationship at the time.
Like Beyoncé, Michel’le comes from a Creole background; she’s even got a stupid apostrophe in her name. Dr. Dre and Michel’le were the original Jay-Z and Beyoncé, except, if Michel’le’s little sister (I don’t know that she has a little sister) swung on Dr. Dre in an elevator, he would have ended up dragging both of them out by their hair, Ray Rice-style.
Broke ‘90s-era R&B singers and rappers’ ex-girlfriends are both known to appear on hoodrat reality series. In that sense, it was inevitable that Michel’le would appear on a show called R&B Divas LA, apparently TV One’s knockoff version of a VH1 reality series. She met every single qualification.
On an R&B Divas LA reunion special, Michel’le revealed to host Wendy Williams that Dr. Dre beat her to the point where she had to have plastic surgery on her face.
And I quote:
Michel’le: “One of my boyfriends hit me and [made it] crooked it until I had to straighten it and change it and it cost a lot of money” Michel’le explained.
WW: “One of your babies’ fathers? You’re speaking of, that broke your nose?”
M: “Absolutely…and I stayed [in the relationship]”
She went on to say she had to “figure out” that domestic violence isn’t an expression of love because her father never told her he loved her.
M: “Getting beat was love to me. When I got with Suge- believe it or not—he didn’t really beat me. I asked him ‘why aren’t you beating me? Don’t you love me?”
WW: By saying Suge didn’t beat you, the finger is pointing at you Dr. Dre. (via)
Michel’le then confirmed that it was Dr. Dre who fucked her face up and discussed having to use makeup to hide her black eyes when performing.
These were the only three incidents that I stumbled upon in the course of researching my article on Dre. A cursory Internets search for the string “Dr. Dre beating woman,” which was auto-suggested by Google, btw, didn’t turn up anything else.
Therefore, I think it’s only fair to Dr. Dre that we assume that these were the only three times in his life that he raised a hand to a woman—though in the case of Michel’le it may have been multiple incidents over the course of several years. But if they’re all the same woman, and probably a certain pattern of behavior prompting the attacks, counting each attack as its own separate incident would only serve to make Dre seem like a worse person than he is.
We already saw what happens when people automatically assume the worst about a male entertainer earlier this year, with Conor Oberst. Turns out, I was the only person on the Internets who was right about that. And if the coverage of the allegations against alt lit author Tao Lin is any indication, the Internets have yet to see the error of their ways. They may be uncorrectable. They’ve already been told twice.
The Michel’le incident(s) were the most recent, based on the rough chronology I put together, and they took place in the 1990s. While the ‘90s still seems like it’s the previous decade, it’s actually two decades ago. We’re just blocking it out of our minds like memories of a childhood sexual assault. They’re being suppressed like my Dre article.
Dr. Dre hasn’t put a shoe on a woman in two decades, as far as I know, and it’s quite possible that he’s a changed man. He certainly looks different! Maybe working out helped him shed the insecurity that drove him to constantly beat the shit out of women—that and the billion dollars. It’s hard to be too upset with women when you can quite literally buy a whole family of women and have them living deep within the recesses of Tom Brady and Gisele’s old house, where he lives now.
At any rate, I can’t condone condemning a man for what Ordell Robbie would call an “old crime” any more than I condone beating up women. The important thing is that we learn from our mistakes.
Byron Crawford is the founder and editor of ByronCrawford.com: The Mindset of a Champion, a former columnist for XXL (no longer a magazine), the author of five books, most recently Kanye West Superstar, and the sender of the free weekly email newsletter Life in a Shanty Town.
