YOUNG, FAMOUS, TALENTED & ABUSED – THE RIHANNA & CHRIS BROWN HOLLYWOOD STORY by Sam Cruickshank

If Rihanna is to stand a chance of having a better life, then she should not be at all concerned about what the world thinks of the photograph circulating around the world depicting her brutal battering on Feb 8th.

Instead she should be focussing on building a safer network of people around her that she can trust in every facet of her life. However, this goal has been complicated already with her trust betrayed by the LAPD who leaked a photo to TMZ of her misfortune. Whether this was wittingly or unwittingly leaked, as a part of a police strategy to persuade the public that Chris Brown should face up to his violent acts like a man, yet remains to be known. But Rihanna must not let this picture’s public release occupy her attention right now.

On the Oprah Winfrey Show on friday, Oprah’s live panel weighed in on the topic of domestic abuse.  One of the startling facts brought to light was the fact that only 1 in 9 victims of domestic abuse ever leave their abuser long term.

If Rihanna stands a chance of leaving Chris Brown, she needs all the encouragement in the world from her team around her to create an environment where she does not feel exploited in any way. In entertainment when an artist’s beauty is being exploited and money is being made off their talent this is a difficult thing to ultimately ensure for a young artist.

Just look at Britney’s Spears tumultuous life last year, when Britney did not have the right team around her, and ask is Rihanna any different? She’s in the same Fame Game as Britney is, so of course she’s not. They are one and the same person. Chris Brown is one of them too. Young stars who feel exploited and who are in siege mode, find it hard to separate fact from fiction, friend from foe, fame from family, lust from love because everywhere they turn, they feel that everyone just ‘wants a piece of’ [them]. More often then not their young lives can’t  sustain the painful demand upon their souls.

There is no room to grow up, and catch up with their true maturity levels, or immaturity levels, outside of what is orchestrated all around them to showcase their talent, which is not the real them, when they are alone, scared and don’t know who they really are outside of what sells records for all who depend on them. In this lonely place together, two young people found a sanctuary in each other’s arms. They were Chris Brown and Robin Rihanna Fenty. Now back to the present day issues at hand for these two pop stars.

It is clearly obvious that Rihanna needs genuine team support more then ever right now around her that she feels is more giving than exploitative. That’s a given. It will help her a lot, if she feels she has this around her, in a genuinely supportive way. Her life and not her talent should matter more than just Rihanna existing just to sell another record or give an awards show, a higher rating.

The same can be said for Leona Lewis for that matter too. Young girls who lift ratings through their vocal talent and rare beauty, like Rihanna and Leona Lewis have proven capable of doing in America and around the world, are sometimes viewed just as exotic anomalies in the world who entertain the masses. However, these girls  come from other countries and they actually really know nobody here in America, outside of being a famous young pop star.

By virtue of being ‘discovered’ by a music mogul, the power rating is already skewed against them, they feel indebted to their producer/ manager although grateful and they are cast in a role where they perhaps have to rely too heavily on what their management teams view of them as being successful individuals. Which will always be, get up on stage and sell more records.

When these girls get tired and burnt out by the industry machine, they can’t really appeal to their managers who can often perpetuate their burn out in the first place by advising them to work hard and not lose their popularity in the Fame Game. There is simply no getting off the treadmill for them, and they can feel alone with no one to really talk to, and vulnerable.

Clearly in Rihanna’s case, Chris Brown offered the young star, some sense of false security from a tired feeling of Rihanna being in the fame cycle and being exploited and profited upon, by all in Rihanna’s camp. Rihanna had sought the illusion of the safety that Chris Brown seemingly was offering her, to escape some wider issues of unsafety in her world that she herself felt powerless to address with anyone else other than Chris.

For a moment there, he appeared to be her angel. He perhaps genuinely wanted to be her angel too, but he is only 18 years old, how could he be and carrying hers and his pressures of fame on his shoulders for too long, without imploding at some point? Abuse then had both of Rihanna and Chris firmly in its unrelenting grip.

Abuse leads to worse abuse, until an individual can cull it entirely from their lives. There are many faces to a state of abuse and exploitation and Chris Brown should not be the only person under speculation in Rihanna’s case history of accepting and tolerating abuse to the degree that she did and to the degree that she tried to cover it up also.

These are the kinds of issues that a team of therapists and her family must work through with Rihanna in order for her to reinstate boundaries in her life against abuse for the future. Clearly, these boundaries have been eroded in the young superstar’s life. Perhaps for quite a while now, long before Chris offered her an escape and a form of salvation in a romantic affair and a brief respite to numb Rihanna’s pain.

It is apparent that Rihanna has experienced enough abuse in her life, that she felt powerless and  incapable to leave Chris Brown any earlier before his abusive behavior had escalated and she fell victim to his physical rage against her in his silver lamb car.

Rihanna was lucky that her lust and love for Chris did not cost Rihanna her life. Chris Brown’s wrath, very well could have.

It must be said though that Rihanna is the oldest of the two, turning 21 on Thursday past, where Chris Brown is 18 years of age, or two and half years her junior. So who really was to blame? And does that even matter at this juncture in terms of the well being of the two and moving them forward to become better individuals with the help they both need?

Abuse is always a two way street between the uses and gratifications that an abuser obtains from the abusee and also what they give and provide for each other (and vice versa). It’s a dialogue of dysfunction that feeds on and between two people. However, abuse itself is like the invisible third person in a relationship; a demon of destruction that rules a couple.

It is subtle because, it hides behind the couple’s faces, and speaks through one another’s mouths and lives in peoples psyches, so the individual in the relationship does not see the destruction of abuse as being a condition and not their actual partner. Therefore abuse lives strongly hurling insults from one lovebird to another.

Put frankly Rihanna and Chris Brown’s penchant for abusing and taking abuse from each other, really is an endemic problem that exists in the socialization patterns of two individuals so much, that they have both come to accept as being a normal expression of love, when really they are decieved from childhood into accepting the demon of abuse as being love. Really abuse is hatred and self hatred. And hatred is ‘love starved of attention.’ (see the book Courage To Love, by Robert Ellis for the meaning of this quote).

The couple caught up in patterns of abuse, like Chris Brown and Rihanna are, perpetuate this narrative and thus become the very people they set out to escape in their childhoods, not to be.

The dominant player of such a relationship is typically the abuser, but both feed this discourse of dysfunctionalism and accept it as their coping mechanism, or as their standard of reality in life and love. It is a crippling mental disability, that impairs and robs individuals to talk past each other. It denies them of the very thing they need, true love.

Abuse robs young people of loving partners, and the future and the children they could have had and happily raised together. Abuse, robs people of their true identity as non-abusers. This is what Chris Brown in particular is grieving and trying to come to grips with, as he potentially is being judged when you need to look at the disease that both him and Rihanna are afflicted by, and not just the brutal physical actions of the person alone who lashes out at the disease to the person they should most care about, like Chris did to Rihanna.

The duos mental disease of domestic abuse, clearly was fully blown, on Oscar’s eve. It was totally out of control between them both.

Undoubtedly, it has not been a happy relationship for both Rihanna and Chris, and they both needed help that they both didn’t  seek any earlier so that their tragedy was averted.

To lose each other, perhaps is the greatest punishment of all to them both. To lose the potential of what they could have both had together due to domestic abuse and feeding and buying into it, is something that both Rihanna and Chris must look at and address at this time. I am sure that they both are, in the moments of silence and aloneness that they are having with themselves away from each other right now. Their loss of their relationship blowing up so publicly is the true tragedy within both of their hearts right now. But why did they not seek help earlier?

Perhaps Chris Brown’s inability to seek help until now that the couple have been exposed, perhaps demonstrates that in his camp he also felt his talent and life were being heavily exploited also, whereby he acted out ferociously and violently on America’s pop princess from Barbados, with his fists. It is a known fact that both Chris and Rihanna have had grueling schedules in past months. That takes its toll and then all around them, are the fans who want a piece of them too in their own personal lives.

Chris Brown’s hideous actions show an 18 year old whose sense of  helplessness came out violently wrong in illegal and inhumane ways towards her. Chris Brown is not a cool, breezy guy at all. He’s not safe and is in a lot of internal pain. His alleged acts of cruel violence against Rihanna are not excusable, at all, or ever. But perhaps this is what was occurring in him at the time. He’s a time bomb of painful abuse, just waiting to explode.

The event still has the world in shock and pondering the back story to the tragedy of young love gone wrong. Either way, hitting a woman or anyone for that matter is wrong, so our sympathies align with Rihanna at this stage of their story.

Irrespective of the fact, that the keepers of justice in Rihanna’s home city of LA, cannot be entirely trusted with handling private evidence pertaining to her case, Rihanna still must put the photo leakage incident behind her with LAPD and rapidly seek to put new boundaries in place where she does not feel so unsafe from those directly around her.

The first issue that Rihanna must truly address is ending her abusive relationship with Brown.

It is a twisted web of seduction that she must unpick in her mind. Rihanna must unravel all of the intertwined strands that made her relationship with Chris Brown seem attractive: the sexuality, the shared musical passion for performance and song, the combined fame and star power as a celebrity couple, the youthful naiveity and of course, the moments of genuine friendship, shared only by two young people who share their unique reality, both exciting and harsh as it is, in the fame game of entertainment.

After all, when you look at them and who their mentors (and yet competing peers in music) are on the same music charts they battle for each month, Rihanna and Chris were just two young people emulating the lives of Beyonce and Jay-Z that loomed large, everywhere around them. However, they perhaps were in a relationship with each other for the wrong reasons, partly for their own protection from others but also thinking that it was the surest way towards being successful stars if they combined their star power.

Perhaps love began to take a back seat as their fame escalated. Not everyone can be Beyonce and Jay-Z and seemingly handle such pressures, but they stood a good chance, until their young lives  became exhausted from all of the pressure upon them.

Chris Brown must also do the same post-Rihanna and unravel all of the strands in his life that he once shared and loved sharing with Rihanna. He now needs to take these things he gave her back, in the same way Rihanna needs to right now, for his own future and well being also.

Statistically, abusive relationships always stay abusive, there is not much hope that one’s loyalty equates to anything better than what Rihanna has already experienced on that fateful night of February 8th with Brown. Look at Tina Turner for example who was with Ike for almost two whole decades and nothing change. It’s only when she left him, that her own voice became its true gift of freedom for the world.

Obviously Brown feels very threatened by Rihanna somehow and his insecure alleged criminal actions against her body, clearly show his fear and jealousy of her in the leaked photograph depicting Rihanna’s brutal injuries. Why was he so afraid of her, to the point where he wanted her to be more afraid of him and he beat her down with his fists?

Was Brown a constant victim of Rihanna’s verbal abuse to him, which caused him to want to act illegally towards her by causing grievous bodily harm? No one knows. It is a probability too, that this could be the case as in most abusive relationships verbal abuse is a cycle that a couple gets into, and not just one party always is to blame.

For example, this is not the Color Purple, both Chris and Rihanna have their own stages, voice and platform as entertainers and individuals to shine on, so we must view it as being a shared dysfunction.

But at this juncture, the world is holding Brown account because of his alleged visible abuse that was simply atrocious towards Rihanna. There is no other way to look at the damage he allegedly caused to Rihanna other than that. It’s shocking. Game over.

The fact that Rihanna was to appear at The Grammys 2009 (Brown too) and he still physically tried to dominate her, like she was his property and that he could get away with that kind of treatment of her, perhaps indicates too that Brown will always see Rihanna (or any woman for that matter) as a mere possession towards enhancing his own fame, popularity and status and not as a life partner that he should love, honor, serve, protect and cherish. Perhaps this was what Brown grew up seeing as being accepted masculinity that he then acted out on Rihanna.

Perhaps everyone around Chris in hip hop demonstrates this similar narrative too, and it needs addressing in the hip hop community. Perhaps Chris and Rihanna’s very public dysfunction and meltdown, is a genuine opportunity for hip hop and music’s rock star couples, to look at this issue, dialogue about it more and open up better dialogue between musical partners who are also real life lovers. Maybe Chris and Rihanna’s mistakes will help others talk about it more and open up this area so that people in music and entertainment can have better relationships as entertainers that are more real and open in the history of hip hop and rock n roll love.

Hey, nobody is perfect and all relationships have issues, but Rihanna’s life was at stake and that should be all the wake up call she needs at this time, to severe her ties with Brown. I would hope that Brown himself is treating his own actions as a tremendous wake up call to himself, to get help and move on from the situation smartly too.

In the life of Whitney Houston we see a woman who can offer Rihanna the olive branch of rebuilding her life from here as a single woman after being in a relationship of unhealthy co-dependance and dysfunction, like Whitney Houston allegedly was with Bobby Brown for years.

Like Chris Brown, Bobby Brown largely bore the flack of the couple’s dysfunction and the way that this was represented in the media. Whitney was always cast as the songbird victim, the brilliant angelic protege of Clive Davis, but both Whitney and Bobby profited off the profits of the positioning of themselves in this particular way in their narrative in showbiz. They sold the magazines.

Everyone felt so sorry for Whitney, so they would buy more and more albums of the star. Bobby was a huge part of her star factor. Whitney was all consuming. Out of the two, the masses and the people wanted her more than they wanted Bobby. This affected the couple, so they played on it in order to survive and be superstars. Abuse fueled this narrative in their personal lives, but it was a narrative that sold.

Everyone loves a trainwreck, they feel better about themselves when they read about one. As long as it is not them. Magazines profit from this fact constantly. That’s the power of abuse in entertainment.

It’s human nature in Hollywood to sacrifice innocence and particularly young potential, to feed the majority. Sadly, Chris and Rihanna have bought into this narrative over the last few months. Until they officially separate they are caricatures of the Bobby and Whitney syndrome of the fame game.

Let’s hope Chris and Rihanna don’t do the same thing as Bobby and Whitney did for years. Both of them were great artists, but they worked out how the system could reward them, and this is what they did for years.

It was a love hate relationship with their fame, and they both understood it, in each other although it wasn’t healthy for either of them to both be in it. Better the devil you know, was the principle that bound them together in the craziness of fame.

No one knows for sure if Rihanna and Chris Brown’s dysfunctionalism was drug dependent and drug related like Whitney and Bobby’s abusive relationship was for years. But there are a lot of early similarities in the Rihanna and Chris Brown incident that could perhaps make the LAPD want to investigate closer into the background behavior of both Rihanna and Chris leading up to the February 8th event.

They are in an industry of sex, drugs and rock n roll, it is all around them so it is to be expected that perhaps it is a factor in the build up to their explosively brutal night. Hopefully drugs did not play a part in their relationship’s demise.

Whitney Houston is still battling to break the aftermath of coping with abuse, with battling past drug addiction and making a much deserved career comeback. Rihanna must somehow find the the strength to do the same in her own life and rebuild her world away from Chris now. He must do the same.

It is very significant, that in his performance at The Grammy Awards recently, the night after Crihannagate occurred, that Rihanna’s manager, hip hop artist Jay-Z performed with Coldplay’s Chris Martin in Coldplay’s song, Lost?

During his rap, Jay-Z poses the question, perhaps to Chris Brown, who do you want to be: Bobby Good or Bobby Brown? It was a powerful moment, that had actually very little to do with the lyrics of Coldplay’s song lyrics, but Jay-Z perhaps reached out from the Grammys stage and spoke to both Chris and Rihanna in that moment like only someone who was their mentor and perhaps friend, could in the music industry.

In my mind, those words of Jay-Z, was ‘the judge has spoken and delivered his verdict to you both.’ Case dismissed. Life is about choices, and which choices are the young couple going to make for a better future for each one of them. Only Chris and Rihanna can decide that for themselves.

When you mistake loyalty for love in a dysfunctional relationship, it will always yield only more pain, so I hope that Rihanna has had all of the wake up calls that she needs to preserve her life and ensure she has a safer future. 

The American media and tabloids are playing the statistics game of the possibility that  Rihanna could choose to go back to Chris Brown. Again, statistically they are 90% right that she could. Whitney once always went back to Bobby. However, Rihanna is refusing to talk about Chris Brown until the legal issues against him are investigated in their case.

Brown is being investigated for attempted murder as well as his brutal assault on Rihanna. It is a mystery that magazines like US Weekly would still try and link the two by printing: ”She keeps saying she still loves him,” a friend reports in their tabloid. Furthermore, according to Star magazine, another of Rihanna’s friends reportedly told Star, that Rihanna has already forgiven Chris for the “misunderstanding,” and she’s reaching out to him through texts and phone calls.

That is also highly unlikely, but  cellphones belong to both Chris and Rihanna and not us. They are both adults and not children, so speculations by the magazine unlong these lines go largely unchallenged in order to sell their magazines with the most jusiest story.

It  must be noted, that currently Rihanna has been cast as the victim of the Crihannagate debarcle and not Chris Brown. Rightly so,due to the photographic evidence of what Chris allegedly did to her. However it needs to be said, that she is currently also the victor of the Crianngate incident too.

Rihanna is presently profiting enormously financially by the incident due to the increased publicity, the outpouring of sympathy all over the world towards her at this time, that it seems unlikely that forgiving Chris Brown anytime soon would be in her financial interests at all, either. She is currently the most talked about women in entertainment in the world. And Rihanna has Chris Brown by the balls quite frankly from a business standpoint.

Everybody wants to boycott Chris and his music’s airplay right now. It appears to be unsafe and unsavory to even play a Chris Brown track on air at all. It’s off limits. Chris’ career is seemingly frozen, whereas hers is not so much. Meanwhile, we all can only wonder and speculate, because at this stage, both share equal blame for the relationships melt down.

Star magazine still tries to fabricate a story further by stating: ”Rihanna says she doesn’t want to make Chris look like a villain in all of this” an insider told Star. The police have already done that for Rihanna, so she doesn’t even have to do that. She has been vindicated largely already by the picture of what Chris Brown allegedly did to her.

But what about Chris Brown? He has issued an apology. However his apology could be regarded merely as the classic behavior of an abuser and a repeat, serial abuser at that. In his recent apology Chris Brown has hidden behind religion (his pastor is ‘counseling’ him) and hidden behind his family (his mother is ‘counseling’ him) to buy him time, hoping until the situation dies down a little, or will just magically go away.

In his apology, he did not mention Rihanna, the person, by name, perhaps indicating again that Rihanna was a possession and not a person, that he somehow in his mind claimed was his, in the life of his new found pop star fame. Historically, abusers are always remorseful when they get caught out, but more often than not, they resort to abuse again when they get emotionally upset again.

Who is most to blame for the couples’ meltdown is all up for discussion and debate. We all know it takes two to tango and our sympathies are perhaps largely on the side of Rihanna in the world. If you look at the pair as a couple, the publicity stunt they both could have staged by their dysfunctional actions in Brown’s car on Grammy’s eve, (wittingly or unwittingly) in their sick dysfunctional private hell, caused the duo to have more airtime than any Grammy winner or hardworking musician who deserved attention more than either Chris or Rihanna did this year.

The outcome their domestic violence achieved was totally insane in terms of stealing the national spotlight on the eve of music’s most important night. What were they both thinking?

Both of them, perhaps should be chastised by the music and entertainment industry for that. No one has talked about much else in music news since February 8th, than their misfortune as a couple. Even the Oscars build up this year, has been overshadowed by the incident.

I think that because the music community are being so gracious on the matter and are not commenting much on it, perhaps indicating that their peers see it as being a tragic and immature incident between two young people, with incredible potential to entertain through music, who just should NOT be going out together!

Their peers in music perhaps are graciously waiting for the penny to drop and for both Chris and Rihanna to realize this smartly, move on and rebuild.

I wish both Chris and Rihanna would move on quicker, so that more deserving, more appreciative and talented musicians can get some of the spotlight back on them and their talents, rather then the focus being on the attention seeking behavior of young people doing whacked out Amy Whinehouse antics, which still sell their records.

I wish both Chris and Rihanna wholeness and well being in both of their lives. But let’s get back to the people who are creating headlines through hard work and good music, today, not last year!!!  

In pop, you’re only as good as your next achievement and Rihanna and Chris have yet to reinvent themselves this year to take their music up another level. Hogging the limelight without doing the work THIS year, is always a bad look. It shows two fame junkies. But where are the next wave of songs that come from both Chris and Rihanna and not just a manufactured pop machine.

This time round, let’s hope they both write and perform their own words and from their own souls, not just their alter egos.

I don’t think other musicians should be held ransom by two spoilt RnB brats who still need to prove this year that they are on top of their game through good music rather than denying other artists their just dues and rewards and attention due on Grammys night. 

ENDS