SoulAlive said:

So he made the comments about her missed dates that she didn't show up to work and talked about her sister? Yeah I'm an Al fan, but sounds like he deserved that slap in the face.....and maybe the grits too.

JackieBlue said:

Yeah he has that crooked preacher vibe don't he?

Abdul said:

RnBAmbassador said:

Yeah I heard about the Ron Isley situation. There was something about him that rubbed me the wrong way especially with the way he allegedly treated Angela Winbush during their marriage.

missfee said:

Makes me think there was more to the grits story than he was telling us...

It wasn't as ugly as Jackie.

But he was nasty 2ward her. I don't remember the exact quote. It was during Patti's sister's death of cancer(I think the 1st one who died in the late 80s).

She and Al were doing a special 2ghether and she got late which pissed Al off, and when she showed up, he mocked her tardiness and said "I bet she's gonna milk her sister's death as an excuse".

Next thing you know, she slapped the grease outta his jheri curl.

Harlepolis said:

Oh that wasn't cool at all!

I think it was Patti's second eldest sister that died that Al was supposedly talking about since it was 1982.

Her eldest died in 1976, also from cancer. I forgot how old she was but probably younger than 45, so was her second eldest, and then her younger sister Jackie died in 1989. All of them died before reaching 50. Patti's the only member of her family (meaning siblings) who made it past that.
[Edited 1/30/11 3:21am]

TD3 said:

Nah I completely understand now. It's still really disturbing.

You know, I hope I'm wrong in my analogy but something about Diana Ross' relationship with Berry Gordy rubbed me off the wrong way...I'm not trying to suggest that Berry assaulted her or whatever but there's been hints Berry was verbally abusive towards her during their relationship...

I found this quote from a 2008 article:

It is interesting how two people can have sharply contrasting remembrances of someone. For example, Gladys Knight says the legendary Jackie Wilson was always kind and supportive during her early years in show business, and never did anything inappropriate. However, Patti LaBelle says Wilson, known to be a womanizer, once tried to rape her backstage at a famous theater where both were performing.

Hip Hop Women Recount Abuse at Their Own Risk
By Carla Thompson
WeNews correspondent

A few women who have survived abusive relationships with rap stars are breaking the silence about domestic violence. But a "no snitch" rule is still widely observed in the hip hop music world.

(WOMENSENEWS)--Big Pun--born Christopher Rios on Nov. 10, 1971 in the Bronx, N.Y.--was a 697-pound platinum-selling solo rap artist who died in 2000 at the age of 28 from a heart attack.

After his death, his widow, Liza Rios, chronicled their stormy relationship and the physical abuse that began when she was 16 years old in the 2002 documentary, "Big Pun: Still Not a Player," which she co-produced and which included footage of Pun pistol-whipping her.

The documentary did not earn Rios many friends in the hip hop community. When she tried to recruit hip hop stars to perform in a fundraising tour to benefit programs to fight domestic violence, her calls went unanswered, according to various reports in hip hop publications.

The documentary did, however, turn journalist Elizabeth Mendez Berry into a Rios fan.

"I think Liza is a hero," says Berry. "She could have been a tragic first lady of hip hop but she decided not to be . . . She could have been sort of 'a first widow,' a woman who gets sympathy galore because of her fallen (husband) and who doesn't rock the boat."

Instead, Berry found that Rios, unlike many hip hop women, was willing to break an unwritten rule about "not snitching" on the domestic violence in the personal lives of rap stars.

After some initial difficulty reaching Rios, Berry interviewed her for an article about domestic violence in the March 2005 issue of VIBE, the New York-based hip hop magazine.
'Rap's Black Eye'

Berry's article ran under the headline, "Love Hurts: Rap's Black Eye."

Aside from Rios, Berry got very few women to allow her to use their names in the story.

Among others, Berry also approached hip hop rhythm and blues singer Faith Evans, the former wife of the late rapper Notorious B.I.G. but Evans, who has sung about the violent death of a young woman at the hands of her boyfriend, was unwilling to talk on the record about her experiences.

She found that many of the women she interviewed--who only agreed to talk to her off the record for fear of reprisal from influential members of the hip hop community--did not think about their experience in terms of "domestic violence." Instead they talked about having "fights."

"They are 5 feet 2 inches and are having 'fights' with guys 6 feet 4 inches," says Berry. "If you ask them if they were abused, they would say 'no.' If you ask them if things ever got physical, they would say, 'Oh yeah, we had 'fights.' The women don't think of themselves as victims because they fought back or initiated the conflict."

One other female artist willing to go on the record with Berry about her abuse was Charli Baltimore, a rapper once signed to the New York City-based Murder, Inc. Records.

Both Rios and Baltimore said they knew enough about the hip hop world to expect repercussions for coming forward, but Berry was unprepared.

"A lot of people were calling me out on the Internet . . . several anonymous writers made negative comments and-or threats about me," says Berry. "People were saying they were worried about me. A period after the article was published, I was advised by colleagues not to go out at night."
How Hazardous is Hip Hop?

Rios's experience, the unwillingness of women to talk openly about domestic violence and the aftermath Berry suffered for writing her article raise questions about how hazardous the hip hop music world is for the health of women associated with it.

Dr. Angie Colette Beatty, assistant professor of communication and African American studies at St. Louis University, says the music is pretty clearly detrimental to the image of black women.

"We see black men being abusive to black women and we see black women not being offended," said Beatty, referring to hip hop videos. "These globally transported images leave the impression that we (black women) are doing it to ourselves and that if we cover up and respect ourselves, the problem would go away."

Beatty says women in hip hop have to "walk a ridiculous line. They have to be hard-core but can't be too masculine." As an example Beatty points to Lil' Kim, the hip hop star who got in legal trouble in 2005 for committing perjury. Beatty says that now she is being celebrated by some in the hip hop community as the first woman to do jail time.
Putting Up With Something Else

Dr. Suraiya Baluch, the director of sexual violence prevention programs at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York, agrees. "The mandate is to be a superwoman," she says. "People have been putting up with cruel and unacceptable behavior and the perception is that this is yet another something that you have to deal with."

Tempering his criticism of hip hop, Mark Anthony Neal, associate professor in the black popular culture program in African and African-American Studies at Duke University in Durham, N.C., notes that the art form expresses social ills and doesn't create them.

"Because hip hop is an easy whipping boy, there is a tendency to attribute the worst gender and sexual politics to castigate hip hop in lieu of having real conversations about domestic violence and other issues more broadly and individual artists within hip hop," says Neal. "We are critical of artists and of the channels, but are never really critical of corporate interests that are producing and distributing it."

Neal also points out that hip hop is not the first musical genre to spawn stories of domestic violence.

"You can talk about James Brown who had a history of domestic abuse as recently as his 70th birthday," says Neal. "And Patti LaBelle talks about Jackie Wilson attempting to rape her in her autobiography. We live in a culturally fundamentally patriarchal society that says men are and should be more powerful than women and violence is the way it is effectively manifested in society."

Berry agrees it is too easy to blame hip hop for domestic violence. "It's not that simple," she says. "But it does contribute to the climate of disrespect. When women are systematically disrespected, people are more likely not going to care what they think. They become comfortable with seeing women objectified, more comfortable seeing them controlled."

Carla Thompson, a New York-based freelance journalist, is author of a memoir, "Bearing Witness: Not So Crazy in Alabama" (August Press) and producer of an award-winning documentary about black women and hair, "The Root of It All" (National Film Network).

Timmy84 said:

I can believe that....but....wasn't he married while he had a relationship with Diana? Not trying to justify the alleged abuse, because it never right in any situation, but it just rubs me the wrong way how a woman can date a married man and know that he's married.

Abdul said:

you got it! Why do you think he has never married all these years? ah hem, running up and down the aisles looking underneath skirts, ah hem.

missfee said:

It's all fucked up. Diana was probably trying to get some status in the label and that's what happened. I just hate how they make it seem like it was a genuine love. Berry cheated on Diana and others with Chris Clark and some other women.

missfee said:

Al Green's a ho.

Holy shit, I never knew that

CalhounSq said:

I wonder how Jackie's wife at the time, Frida Hood, took up with Jackie's philandering. He was a reported notorious cheater.

Timmy84 said:

Didn't the girl that threw the grits on Al, kill herself soon afterward?

Timmy84 said:

Didn't he got shot by some female(a motel cleaner or some shit, I 4got)?

Some women don't take being fucked over very slightly.

shorttrini said:

Yeah, Al said that the girl asked for marriage and Al said he wasn't ready for commitment. But who knows what happened. I refuse to believe that the girl, Mary Watson I believe was her name, just cook some hot grits and just threw it on his back for no reason. Al must've meant the world to her and he turned her down something serious but who knows? I don't wanna speculate further on things I don't really know shit about... lol
[Edited 1/18/09 11:11am]

shorttrini said:

"Supposedly"

That WHOLE deal is full of stench, I personally don't buy that "suicide" bullshit.

But then again, everything is suspicious to us black folks, right?

Hot messes. All of 'em. Sex is a helluva 'drug'.

Harlepolis said:

Yeah, apparently the woman and Jackie were dating for some time and it's odd that around this point, Jackie dated another woman (one of Sam Cooke's former girlfriends) and apparently this woman heard about it and decided to take matters in her own hands so to speak. Jackie was in critical condition but he had successful surgery and he survived the incident. The bullet however remained in his body for the rest of his life.
[Edited 1/18/09 11:18am]

OK, they told it better than I could:

By 1961 Jackie was involved with Harlean Harris, a former girlfriend of Sam Cooke and a Ebony magazine fashion model while at the same time having a relationship with a Juanita Jones.

February 15, 1961, Jones shot Wilson twice as he returned with Harris to his Manhattan apartment. Despite his wounds, Wilson made it downstairs where he was taken to the Roosevelt Hospital. Life saving surgery was performed followed by weeks of medical care. Wilson lost a kidney and would carry the bullet that was to close to his spine to be removed, around for the rest of his life.

A month and a half later Jackie was discharged and, apart from a limp and discomfort for a while, he was quickly on the mend.
[Edited 1/18/09 11:19am]

Harlepolis said:

Something HAD to happen to make Al think that church would "save him" so to speak.

Timmy84 said:

I don't see Chruch in him

Sherly Underwood said something that ringed my head, she said that when somebody turns to any religion for comfort, it shows in his face and his attitude.

Maybe I'm being prejudiced,,,,but I sure as stone hell don't see ANY sign of religion in that man except when I read his name

Vibe did an article on the girl that threw the grits on Al. They interviewed her son who said he cringed every time he heard the story. Apparently, the woman was a little fast in the ass and was one for stepping out and hanging with singers. She was involved with someone else famous, I think before Al, but I am blanking on the name. The woman left her hubby and kids for Al. I think the article is maybe 3, 4 years old

The woman killed herself right after she gritted Al, I believe. Coincdentally, Al is from the Debarge's home base, Grand Rapids. I always thought he was a Southern boy.
[Edited 1/18/09 11:52am]

scriptgirl said:

OK,,,,I so wanna read that article.

scriptgirl said:

What?! I think I saw parts of it but I blurred that out. They used to have VIBE books at a barber shop where I used to get my haircut at and I think Al's story was in one issue but I remember I skimmed through it. Al IS a Southern boy though, he was born in Arkansas.

he might have been born there, but I think he grew up in or spent a large portion of time in Grand Raggedy