Danity Kane is tired. The group—well, three out of five: Dawn Richard, Aubrey O’Day, and Shannon Bex—just finished their Cosmopolitan photo ...
But it isn’t just the exhaustion of the road, or the day’s schedule, that has them yawning. Danity Kane is tired of the bullshit, too.
You remember Danity Kane. The girl group created right before our eyes on Diddy’s MTV reality series Making the Band 3 in 2005. And the girl group that disbanded right before our eyes in an explosive, uncomfortable season finale episode just three years later.
If you need a refresher, Richard, O’Day, and Bex, along with D. Woods and Aundrea Fimbres, beat out thousands of pop princess wannabes for a spot in Diddy’s all-female RnB-influenced pop group signed to Bad Boy Records. They were everything you’d expect from a mid-aughts pop act: girl power-infused lyrics, coordinated sex kitten style, and the sort of choreography you’d try at home while watching the music video on TRL. Their earworm of a bop “Damaged” is probably playing in your head right now. If it’s not, it will now. You’re welcome.
And then Diddy fired O’Day. And then D. Woods. And then the group eventually, officially called it quits. In the years since, several members have struck out on their own. Richard was part of the duo Diddy Dirty Money that performed with, you guessed it, Diddy, and most recently, has her own solo career as D∆WN. Bex has had her own solo career, too. Today, she’s part of an educational tech start-up, and a member of Dumblonde, a dance-pop duo with O’Day. And O’Day, in addition to her solo career and Dumblonde, has remained a reality TV mainstay with stints on NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice, CBS’ Celebrity Big Brother, E!’s Famously Single, and most recently, WE tv’s Marriage Bootcamp: Reality Stars.
There's been plenty drama, too. See: a failed reunion; rumors of an affair with a certain Jr. in the White House. But now the gang's all back for a reunion tour (sans Fimbres and Woods who opted not to participate) performing both as Danity Kane, and their own music.
And they've worked through their issues—throughout our chat, all three of them share knowing smiles and heartfelt words to and about one another, holding hands and leaning comfortably against each other—and are doing it all on their own. That is, as I learned in our conversation, without the men (the managers, the record execs, the artists formally known as Puff Daddy, hell, even the exes) that helped skyrocket their careers and nearly destroyed them.
So how did this reunion happen?
Aubrey O’Day: I started going to therapy after I got out of my toxic relationship with Pauly D. I don't need to add any more of those to the plate, and Dawn was one of those for me. I really wanted to mend that relationship. You add enough of them up and you start to become jaded and have a chip on your shoulder.
We got into it pretty quick. We don't mince words. We talked about everything that happened between us and we came to a spot where we understood that we weren't going to agree on the way that each other saw everything but we're OK with that.
We were constantly fighting for each other, but we were young, we had no idea how to grab the power.
We've grown as women. We've all been through hell at the hands of many things: the industry, our egos, men. We're at a place now where we really understand ourselves and each other better and saw the value of the loss that we were experiencing without each other.
So what came next?
Dawn Richard: I always thought that we were always put in situations where men in the industry were always belittling us and pitting us against each other. That was a lot of the reason why we would fight. We would fight for our own validity.
O’Day: It wasn't with each other.
Richard: This time around, I hit Aubrey up and was like, "You want to do a tour? You do your stuff, we do our stuff. No middle people. We control it and see how we feel about it." That's when she went to Shannon like, "OK, it'll be small at first." I thought that what they were doing was great; I thought what I was doing was great and I was like, "What do you think about doing it together?"
It sounds like you're in total control.
O’Day: We're our agents, manager, costume designer, set designer, music director, editor, band, photoshoot editor, sometimes photographer as well.
In prepping for this interview, I re-watched the episode of Making the Band 4 in which Diddy fires Aubrey and D. Woods from the group, and it just struck me how anti-feminist it was. I mean, he used words like “promiscuous” to explain his reasoning…
Richard: It wasn't about her being “promiscuous.” It was about the power to prove, I own your career.
O’Day: And I'm not promiscuous. I didn't lose my virginity until my senior year of college.
Richard: It wasn't even about that. It gave him an excuse. It was to let you know, This is my show, this is my shit, and I want to prove to you that it's my shit and I'm going to show you how much power I have over you by saying I'm going to control your lives. It's so much bigger than that even though, you're right, it was extremely sexist.
It was really uncomfortable to watch.
Shannon Bex: Whenever you had conversations with him, it was almost like you were asking, "Is this OK?" And Aubrey didn't like to bring the apprehension, so she was like, No! This is what it is. He didn't like that.
It felt like a reaction to...
O’Day: Being challenged.
And someone having power when you want to be the only one with power and reacting to that.
Richard: It gets even deeper that—I remember having discussions with D. and when we would talk, we would always say, it had to be Aubrey because we would say shit and the first thing that they would tell us is, if you're a black women, we're going to paint you as the angry black women.
They would tell us is, if you're a black women, we're going to paint you as the angry black women.
O’Day: If something needed to change, we'd all get together first and they'd be like, “Aubrey, go do it.” Because as a white women with big tits, everybody laughed it off. Whereas, I was always brushed off in regards to my talent and when it came to that, my other girls had to go out and be like, “She can sing this part.”
Richard: We were constantly fighting for each other, but we were young, we had no idea how to grab the power of our unity.
O’Day: And we wanted to be here and when you want to be in the industry...
Richard: You try to play the game.
O’Day: And Puff plays one of the dirtiest games there is around and that's what we were exposed to at 17 years old.
There’s also been a cultural shift, I think. Back then, there wasn't talk within pop culture about what the patriarchy is and women wanting all the power that they deserve.
Richard: You had to look a certain way. Whatever your image was, that's what you had to be for the rest of your life. Women change daily. You're telling us we can't evolve?
O’Day: When I was doing Celebrity Apprentice, I was doing all these old fashioned looks. I have this amazing hairstylist and he would do all of these classic looks on me in the boardroom and I remember maybe the fourth or fifth episode, two producers came over to me and said, "Aubrey, you're the youngest one we've had here. You're running circles around everyone. Nobody thought you'd do this well, but Trump thinks you're ugly."
What?
O’Day: "He's wanting to get rid of you. He wants to keep the dumb Miss Universe around because she's really pretty and she's hot and he thinks that we'll do better. She gets more ratings." They said, "You are beautiful though and we know that but you’ve got to stop doing like..."
They treat you like you're just something, not someone.
And I'm like, Dude, these looks I'm pulling are classic. All these other bitches are showing up in Forever21 looking budget and I'm over here working with the best people, looking polished. They were like, "I know, but our audience is the NASCAR audience. They don't understand your looks. We're trying to help you. Part your hair down the middle, wear it straight, and wear a tight dress that pushes up your tits."
Richard: That's what they're told, and it's insane because you get it from every gambit. Jimmy Iovine told Kalenna [editor’s note: Kalenna Harper was a member of Dirty Money with Richard; the duo performed with Diddy as Diddy-Dirty Money] and I are to our face, he looked at Puff and said, "Why don't you have two light skinned girls?" In front of a boardroom of fifty people.
Bex: They treat you like you're just something, not someone.
Richard: He said, "These girls are too ugly. I don't get it. What are you trying to do with this?" I remember feeling exactly how Aubrey felt. You know you're more than this and you're sitting there and you're being told as a grown woman you're ugly.
Bex: Not even told to you, but told in front of you to other people talking about you.
Richard: And the worst part was my boss then said when we left, "I need y'all to go put on a mini-skirt and we're gonna straighten your hair" and they brought us back in the room. And he still didn't get it. No one fought for us, ever. We've only had to fight for ourselves. There was no one who was willing to say, "We have your back."
[Editor’s note: We reached out to both Diddy and Jimmy Iovine to discuss the above. Diddy’s team could not be reached for comment. Iovine declined to comment. We reached out to Harper, too. She responded via email and wrote, in part, "I personally was encouraged from Puff, verbally, to never change what I looked like. There were people that thought Dirty Money was a reach. I heard through the grapevine that Puff was being asked why he didn't use Cassie, etc. But Puff insisted on the sound matching the look." She also fondly recalled meeting Iovine prior to joining Diddy Dirty Money, writing, "by this point he was letting me know that I was now one of his favorite writers and favorite voices to listen to."]
O’Day: Our first manager Johnny Wright who was with us for a long time, one time he took me to dinner and was like, “You need to hold this group together." And I was like, "We're not getting along, it's not working." And he said, "I want to tell you something and this is the realest thing you're ever going to hear.” He said, “The managers, the agents, the lawyers, the booking, the CPAs, we're all going to be here in 10-15 years. You guys have got a short lifespan and we can replace you or you will be replaced quickly and we'll have another girl group and another girl group and another girl group. You guys are the only ones that are temporary. We're the ones that are always here.”
He was trying to tell me something that is a reality, but it's so sad that the one person that is replaceable in a situation of a star with talent is the star with talent. And the agents, the CPAs, all of that are majority men and a lot of them are men who talk to women in the ways that we've described today.
But you know what's crazy? I'd sit around sometimes and bitch with my mom about all of this and she'd listen to me and move on. I'd be like, “Aren't you outraged that we have to go through this?” My mom is an attorney and she said, “Aubrey, it's everywhere. It's with my friends that are doctors, it's with my friends that are attorneys…” The hierarchy and the men in power. The way that women are looked at, compensated, demeaned. I'm not saying that it's all the time...
Richard: And it's not all men, but it's just what we've experienced.
O’Day: It's happening and happened way too much.
I think it's a lot of women's experience.
Richard: It's beautiful that we're talking about it now. We've been hiding. It's almost like this secret club where we only look at each other and know.
Right, and that's the thing, you think, Am I crazy? Am I taking that wrong?
O’Day: And they make you think you're crazy. We talked about this. My ex is way bigger than me and everybody loves him and he's been painted as this golden boy and he's got this great smile and he knows how to charm women. He walks into a room and motherfuckers are like, Oh my god, he's the sweetest, kindest, that big smile, he's so great! When behind closed doors, he's like a completely different human being.
It gets so dark that I was shocked and I'm pretty dark. The amount of abuse and things that I felt—and I also want to be fair, I really loved him and had a lot of great times. It's very hard to say both things as if you can't have one without the other, but you can. It's very hard when you're strong, successful, or powerful or trying to make your mark, to come forward and say I'm weak. I lost myself. I allowed myself to be abused. To admit that we were taken advantage of or we allowed people to do this to us. Or we wanted to be where we got so bad, that we dealt with it. We kept our mouths shut because you don't get to where we're at by mouthing off.
Richard: As you get older, especially as a woman, you ain't tolerating shit, especially if you're strong. I just decided I'd rather be the angry black woman than be the woman that shuts up. That's not who I wanted to be and I realized when I got out of DK, that's what they had created.
We kept our mouths shut because you don't get to where we're at by mouthing off.
I'd rather be the bitch and have my sanity and be amongst other women who are incredible. I don't see bitches, I see queens and people who are dictating their lives. I'm very proud that we're able to speak about this because I think we have been having a secret society of eyeballing for way too long.
We need to put more women in power and in more spaces so we can have this dialogue. I don't think this hurts men's egos. I think they need to understand that they don't even have the vernacular. They've been speaking in such a different way, they don't even realize they're doing it because it's become practiced.
O’Day: And women need to learn to support each other. Men will always choose the man in a room even if they don't like him and women won't do that. We have more women in this society and yet we have not had a female president. That's a problem.
Richard: The president will come. It's really up to us. Men will learn from the groundwork we give. We have to do this. I'm so happy we're able to sit in here, because I didn't know her story of abuse and I never talked about mine.
How do you, in the face of all of that, take care of yourselves? How do you self-preserve?
Bex: I actually started working with a life coach counselor these last few months, so when I get myself in a situation that overwhelms me, I can go, Hey, that's because I'm not built like that and I can't be hard on myself. That actually depletes my energy more than it helps my energy. Just recognizing how you tick and function because even though you live with yourself, doesn't mean you know yourself.
I don't see bitches, I see queens and people who are dictating their lives.
Richard: Yoga and meditation is saving my life. All I've ever known how to be is an artist and just work. I never knew how to be a woman, just myself. I've been trying to find what I love beyond the work and start to do more. Travel is the most important thing for me. Growing up where I come from, you don't leave New Orleans. If you're from the hood, you probably stay there. I promised myself once a year, I leave. Go anywhere. No phone, nothing. No tech, no nothing.
How about you, Aubrey?
O’Day: I'm still in my work. I probably have the hardest time disconnecting and finding peace outside of it all. But I'm a soul-searcher in everything that I do so it's like, in my work I find myself. I recharge through it. But the things I do outside of work, I haven't gotten good at that yet.
Bex: You kind of don't know what to do with yourself. I fear sometimes that you use it to distract yourself from problems.
O’Day: Probably. I feel like I have a pretty good handle on myself. I know what I am and I know what I'm not. I have a good understanding of life and what I want and what I don't want. Finding that place of joy outside of what I love right now...I don't know that I've found that. I’m still searching.
Of all the lessons you’ve learned, if you could go back and tell the younger versions of yourselves anything, what would it be?
O’Day: No one really cares. I just spent so much of my time thinking that I'm just going to be so humiliated by every bad edit, every lie told, every time I disappointed myself. As I've gotten older, I've just realized that nothing lasts forever. No one really cares. They'll laugh for a second, they'll forget about you tomorrow.
When I was living at Pauly's, and in the world of Pauly, that was all we talked about and cared about. We'd go touch the Maserati, we'd go touch whatever the fuck cars he has. We'd look at the bike, his Rolex shaker, the jewelry; we'd talk about how he's better than everybody and then we'd go to bed and do it again the next day.
I was living in the rinse and repeat of that, but I was also fighting my age and fighting the fact that I always chose my career first. Here's this man that wanted to make me a wife, that shared his baby with me. That's the first time I got to be a mom and I'm in love with his child. I lost her in all of it, which is still not something I'm OK with.
But anyway, when I would sit there and I got so stuck and so lost, I would think, I wish for our worst day back on tour when everything went wrong and all I did was bitch the whole time about how everyone failed us and how this wasn't right, that wasn't right. I wished for one of those days back just to be appreciative of all that I was given that day.
Imagine had Diddy just encouraged us to be our greatest selves at that time.
Bex: I will say, in a humble way, I feel like I've always had a very healthy head on my shoulders and a level-head perspective. From the beginning, anytime I’ve entered into a large journey in my life, I was like, Enjoy this moment. If I could tell myself something? Probably find my voice sooner. Not being a people pleaser and just step out a little more.
Richard: I would've told myself to own my blackness. It was a different time. It wasn't cool to be dark, it wasn't cool to be thin, they had pounds of weave on us. I would've loved if someone would've just told us we was beautiful as is no matter how we looked. If somebody would've been like, “Black is fly. Don't lose no weight, don't gain no weight. Right there, that looks good.” I would've told my younger self, “Own that shit.”
Not that it matters, but have you heard from any of those men that were in power when you were Danity Kane, or on Celebrity Apprentice, or anywhere on the journey toward this reunion? Any apologies?
O’Day: Next question! The silence is telling you.
Richard: And it speaks volumes because it means you never cared. You never were for us. You were never truly supportive.
O’Day: Imagine had Diddy just encouraged us to be our greatest selves at that time. Look at after all of that, we're back together and we just did an incredible show that featured all of us in our greatness. Imagine had he made us believe in it at that age, what we could be right now.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/music/a24477124/danity-kane-reunion/?utm_medium=social-media&utm_source=twitter&src=socialflowTW&utm_campaign=socialflowTWCOS by JEN ORTIZ
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