Director F. Gary Gray's Straight Outta Compton has been a box-office smash, clearing almost $60 million in its first week. As N.W.A.'s story has been brought back into the light, there has been renewed speculation on Dr. Dre's 1991 assault on journalist Dee Barnes, which was not included in the film. Since seeing the film, Barnes has penned an op-ed for Gawker, in which she accuses Gray of being an "opportunist" for presenting a "revisionist history" of the story of N.W.A. and, specifically, Dr. Dre.
It's just been revealed that a scene showing Dre's assault of Barnes was originally included in the script, but was cut in order to give the film an appropriate runtime. Whether or not that one scene alone would compensate for its "revisionist history" is yet to be known, though Barnes never expected the scene to be shown on screen. "The truth is too ugly for a general audience," she writes. She herself didn't want to watch her character get brutally beaten -- "But what should have been addressed is that it occurred."
Dee Barnes was a member of the hip-hop duo Body & Soul and was later the host of Fox's hip-hop show Pump It Up. She had collaborated with Dre and other members of N.W.A. before she was assaulted by Dre at an L.A. nightclub in 1991.
A photo posted by Dee Barnes (@sista_dee_barnes) on Aug 14, 2015 at 11:35pm PDT
Barnes has shared more extensive accounts of the assault in past interviews. Horrible details include Dre repeatedly slamming her head against a brick wall while his bodyguard held away at gunpoint those who came to her defense. In the new op-ed, she briefly describes Dre beating her on down the club's bathroom floor after she had attempted to flee.
"'Oh my god. He's trying to kill me.' He had me trapped in that bathroom; he held the door closed with his leg. It was surreal."
Dre spoke on the assault, as well as on other charges of violence against women, including former collaborator and girlfriend Michel'le, in his recent Rolling Stone cover story, though without directly addressing any particular incident.
"I made some f*cking horrible mistakes in my life. I was young, f*cking stupid. I would say all the allegations aren't true - some of them are. Those are some of the things that I would like to take back. It was really f*cked up. But I paid for those mistakes, and there's no way in hell that I will ever make another mistake like that again."
In a recent interview with VladTV, Michel'le said she wasn't surprised she was absent from the film: "...I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat up and told to shut up." She also claims that Dre attempted to shoot her and the bullet "missed by inches."
Dre plead no contest to charges of assault against Barnes and the lawsuit was settled out of court over two years after the incident. With regard to the settlement she received from Dre, Barnes maintains that she has had to work 9 to 5's ever since to make ends meet and that she has been blacklisted from the industry she loves, in which everyone is scared of jeopardizing their relationship with Dre. She says she auditioned for the part of Kimberly Elise in the 1996 film Set It Off, of which F. Gary Gray was the director. He denied her the part because he had cast Dre as Black Sam.
Gray was also the cameraman on Pump It Up and he shot Barnes' interview with Ice Cube that supposedly led her to be the victim of Dre's assault. The interview was shot soon after Cube left N.W.A. and showed him firing some nasty words at his former groupmates. Barnes pleaded with Gray to edit out the inflammatory footage -- not to protect herself, but to prevent violence among the group -- but Gray didn't listen.
Barnes believes the film is not only guilty of erasing the group's violence against women but of neglecting the importance of women to the N.W.A. story altogether. Female artists like JJ Fad, Yo Yo, Jewell, Lady of Rage, Tairrie B and Michel'le, the latter two whom were both allegedly assaulted by Dre, were all instrumental to the success of N.W.A. and its group members. "It's easy for them to be dismissive of women because they don't respect women," writes Barnes.
In a Q&A session following a screening of the movie, Gray said Barnes' assault was cut from the movie because "We had to make sure we served the narrative; the narrative was about N.W.A. It wasn't about side stories."
"You can make five different N.W.A. movies. We wanted to make the one we wanted to make."
Of course, Barnes is hardly surprised that the men involved in the film's production made the film they wanted to make. For a different N.W.A. story, read her full op-ed here.
