On Friday, three days after Gawker ran Dee Barnes’s essay “Here’s What’s Missing From Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up,” the New York Times ran a piece that included an official apology from Dr. Dre addressed to “the woman I’ve hurt.” Barnes’s response to Dre’s apology is below.
Days after journalist Dee Barnes published a first-hand account of the abuse she suffered at the hands of Dr. Dre, the famed producer and current Apple consultant has issued an apology. “Twenty-five years ago I was a young man drinking too much and in over my head with no real structure in my life,” he said in a statement to the New York Times. “However, none of this is an excuse for what I did.”
On January 27, 1991, at a record-release party for the rap duo Bytches With Problems in Hollywood, producer/rapper/then-N.W.A. member Dr. Dre brutally attacked Dee Barnes, the host of a well-known Fox show about hip-hop called Pump It Up! Dre was reportedly angry about a Pump It Up! segment hosted by Barnes that aired in November 1990. The report focused on N.W.A., and concluded with a clip of Ice Cube, who had recently left the group, insulting his former colleagues. Soon after the attack, Barnes described it in interviews: She said Dre attempted to throw her down a flight of stairs, slammed her head against a wall, kicked her, and stomped on her fingers. Dre later told Rolling Stone, “It ain’t no big thing – I just threw her through a door.” He pleaded no contest to assault charges. Barnes’s civil suit against Dre was settled out of court.
In January of 1991, producer/rapper and then-N.W.A. member Andre “Dr. Dre” Young attacked hip-hop journalist Denise “Dee” Barnes in a nightclub. If you hadn’t heard about the incident going into F. Gary Gray’s N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, which hits theaters in two weeks, you’d leave the theater none the wiser. It’s never mentioned.
