Image via Red Table Talk/Facebook
Few people in the public eye have endured as much loss as Bobby Brown has. The R&B superstar appeared on Facebook Watch’s Red Table Talk on Wednesday, April 14, and shared a heartfelt conversation with Jada Pinkett Smith, her daughter, Willow, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris. They spoke about his relationship with the late Whitney Houston, his struggles with addiction, and the loss of his two children, Bobbi Kristina Brown and Bobby Brown Jr. Those topics have been heavily covered in the media, but it doesn’t compare to hearing the “My Prerogative” singer talk about his experiences from his perspective and in his own words.
The singer is still reeling from the death of his 28-year-old son, who died unexpectedly last year from a drug overdose, and wants parents and their children to learn from his situation and take heed when it comes to the dangers of using drugs. Brown is also still coping with his daughter’s loss in 2015 and is figuring out how to live a better life to help create a better path for his three youngest children. His wife, Alicia Etheredge, also joined the red table. Together, they opened up about therapy, finding ways to help him grieve and maintain his sobriety in order to break the generational cycles that have haunted the New Edition singer and his family for decades. Here are some key takeaways from the latest Red Table Talk episode, “An Urgent Warning from Bobby Brown.”
The singer opened up about losing his son Bobby Brown Jr.
Bobby Brown Jr. died at age 28 from the combined effects of alcohol, cocaine, and the opioid fentanyl. He was found unresponsive by his girlfriend in the bedroom of his Encino, Los Angeles home on Nov. 18, 2020, and was pronounced dead at the scene. “Losing him was very, very unexpected, just like losing my daughter. We were just in the studio two days before. It was something that hit me really, really hard. He was a musician, played piano, played drums. He was a great writer. He was a teacher and learner. He learned from everybody that he was around, and he taught just as much as he learned,” Brown said of the son he shared with ex Kim Ward. “I admired him as a young man. He grew up and he just wanted to be part of something special.” The singer didn’t know his son was struggling because he wasn’t a heavy user. “I did not know. And let me make it clear, he wasn’t a user. He would experiment with different things. It wasn’t like he was dependent on drugs like when I was in my situation, I depended. I needed it. He was a young man that tried the wrong stuff, and it took him out of here.”
Brown wants people to know about the dangers of fentanyl
It has been reported that black market drugs are being secretly laced with fentanyl, and just three milligrams of the drug can be fatal. The hospital-grade painkiller is meant to be used after surgery under doctor’s order only. It has quickly become a favorite for street dealers because it’s cheap to produce and is highly addictive. Fentanyl can reportedly be 50 times stronger than heroin and can kill someone in 20 minutes, which is why it was named the deadliest drug in America. “These kids today, they’re trying different things. They’re trying to get as high as they can possibly get. That’s a real problem because they don’t know what these drugs are being mixed with these days,” Brown said. “There are murderers out there right now that are creating these synthetic drugs that are just killing these kids. It’s like they’re committing murder. That’s homicide.” The investigation on who his son got the drugs from is ongoing, but he hopes the people responsible face the consequences. “The investigation is still going on. I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed that they find the people and get these drugs off the street. But my babies are gone. I have been through my time, and I know that my time played a part in my son feeling like he could test something, and I feel guilty about that,” he said. “Every single thing that you do, everything that you do, every decision you make, is going to affect that human life, and I absolutely did not consider that at 17 years old.”
His relationship with Whitney Houston was volatile because of their drug use
The singers met in 1991 at the height of their careers and started dating soon after. They tied the knot on July 18, 1992, and they welcomed Bobbi Kristina in 1993. Brown and Houston then starred in the 2005 reality show Being Bobby Brown but divorced two years later in 2007. Houston was found dead in a bathtub in a Beverly Hills Hilton hotel room just before the Grammy Awards in February 2012. She was 48. Throughout their marriage, there were reports of drug use, domestic violence, and infidelity. On the Red Table Talk, Brown said that their drug use was to blame for their toxic relationship.
“The violence that occurred was using. That’s violence in itself. That’s abuse. We abused drugs and alcohol. We fought hard verbally, and we loved even harder. Verbally it gets really, really messy,” he said. “Our love was strong for each other. We showed it to each other time and time again. We just got caught up, but that had nothing to do with how we felt about each other. The love was always there. We tried so hard we struggled really hard as a couple to get clean for ourselves. I got clean a long time before she did. We were already divorced. She was a strong woman she was fighting really hard to save her own life. I had strength enough for myself at that time. Being an addict, I had to save myself in order to be able to save someone else, I had to save myself first. Unfortunately, we grew apart while I was trying to find myself.”
He spoke about being wrongfully blamed for introducing Houston to drugs
There have been long-standing rumors that Houston started using drugs when she started dating the R&B singer. During the interview, they showed a clip from a 2013 interview when Houston’s brother told Oprah that he was the one who introduced her to drugs, refuting the rumors that Brown was the one who led her down that path. In his book Every Little Step, Brown said that the first time he saw his ex-wife ingest cocaine was on their wedding day. “I don’t look at pointing the finger. We did it together. It’s not that I started her or that she started me. Drugs are a bad thing. You get caught up in it. Once you’re caught up in it, there’s no stopping,” he said. “That energy starts to take over the relationship, it starts to take over who you are as people and that’s what happened between us.” Pinkett-Smith then asked him what he would say to Whitney now, and he answered: “She’s definitely missed in my heart and in my spirit. She was my friend. She was the mother of my child. One of the greatest entertainers that I’ve ever met. Greatest singers. One of the greatest voices the world has ever beared witnessed to. For what it all meant, God has a plan that I can’t question. It was already written in the book.”
He opened up about Bobbi Kristina’s death
In 2015, three years after her mother died, Bobbi Kristina was found dead in the bathtub of the townhome she shared with boyfriend Nick Gordon. She was 22. Her cause of death was revealed in 2016, and it was determined that she died as a result of immersion in water and drug intoxication. Brown was living in California at the time, while his daughter was living in Georgia with her boyfriend. Gordon was reportedly abusive to her, but Brown says he was unaware. “I wasn’t told about it. Other people might have saw that were around her. But I didn’t see it and she didn’t tell me anything. I found out after her passing,” he said. “That was the hard part, I don’t know why I didn’t see it. We hadn’t been spending as much time together after her mother’s death as we should’ve spent.”
Brown said he feels somewhat responsible and wishes he had acted sooner, but he suppresses those feelings in order to move forward. The singer also revealed his daughter was just days away from moving in with him, and that’s what he regrets the most. “There are thoughts that go through your head, but the three, four months before her passing, we had become closer and closer. She had a plane ticket and everything ready to come stay with me. It was just a matter of two days before she would have been on a flight. Two days before this all happened. If I could just get those two days back she would still be here,” he said. “Because I would have found out what was going on and to do something about it. It was rough and it’s still rough, I think about it every day. I’m filled with, how do I say it, like it’s pushed down. I’m keeping it away from me as much as possible because I couldn’t do nothing then, and I can’t do anything now.”
Brown believes Nick Gordon is responsible for Bobbi Kristina and Houston’s deaths
Houston took Gordon in at age 12, and she raised him as her own and as a brother to Bobbi Kristina. The pair became romantically involved after Houston’s 2012 death, and people around them believed their relationship was abusive. Following Bobbi Kristina’s death, a multimillion-dollar civil suit filed by the conservator of her estate alleged that Gordon had physically abused her, saying that he had knocked out her teeth and dragged her up the stairs. The lawsuit also said he had controlled her and taken a significant amount of her money without permission and had represented himself as her husband to access the multimillion-dollar estate she’d inherited from her mother. The suit also alleged that he “gave Bobbi Kristina a toxic cocktail rendering her unconscious and then put her face down in a tub of cold water causing her to suffer brain damage.”
In September 2016, a judge in Atlanta ruled that Gordon was legally liable for Bobbi Kristina’s death. Gordon repeatedly missed court deadlines in the case, so the judge said the conservator of Brown’s estate had won by default. A judge ordered Gordon to pay more than $36 million in damages in November 2016. Although Brown says he was unaware of how volatile the relationship between his daughter and Gordon was, he does know he was also around when his ex-wife died, and said he believes the guy was the one that provided them with drugs. “Definitely. He was the only one there with both situations with my ex-wife and my daughter. And they both died the same way,” Brown said. “So you think that he killed Whitney as well?” Willow asked. Brown responded: “I believe so.”
“Do you think he provided Bobbi Kristina and Whitney with the drugs? How do you think that he’s culpable?” Adrienne asked. “Yes, I think. This is my opinion of who I think this young man was, being around my daughter and being around my ex-wife, I think he was more so a provider of ‘party favors,’” Brown said. Gordon died in January 2020 in Florida from a heroin overdose, according to People. The singer said he wanted to talk to Gordon about his daughter but never got the chance. “Before his death, I was in rehab at the time, when he passed. I had planned on once I left rehab to approach the young man just to find out how my daughter was in her last days. But I never got the chance to find out from him or talk to him.”
He started the Bobbi Kristina Serenity House
In memory of his daughter, Brown started the non-profit domestic violence organization The Bobbi Kristina Serenity House to help other victims experiencing violence in their relationships. He says while he hopes to help others, this step helped him in his healing. “Starting Bobbi Kristina Serenity House for us was essential to the process,” he said. “Domestic violence is like a hush-hush thing. People need to start speaking up if they see somebody in a situation like that, help them. All it takes one phone call, find the counseling that they need and we try to help as much as possible. “
Brown has been sober for nearly 20 years
The singer said he has been clean for 19 years from narcotics and a year sober from alcohol. “I caught myself in time. I look at it as that I can’t get worse than I was because I know my bottom,” the New Edition singer said, adding that going to jail for 60 days is what got him clean from drugs. “I’ve never thought I would spend a day in jail. I went to jail for a DUI. It felt like an eternity. Without narcotics, the first 20 days, it was just hell.” He recalled feeling grateful that he was put in jail, which forced him to quit cold turkey and gave him a new outlook on life. “I was thankful that they put me in jail. I was seeing everything for the first time again and everything looked beautiful.”
While he hasn’t used drugs in nearly two decades, the singer said alcohol took him longer to quit, and it was only when it started affecting his health that he realized it was time to be fully sober. “I felt that with alcohol, I started losing bodily functions. My body started shutting down because I was drinking that much. My body was just giving out on me,” Brown said. “Even with alcohol, I got to the point where I needed it. I wasn’t getting drunk anymore. I wasn’t getting a little tipsy anymore. I needed it to wake up, I needed it to stop the shakes, to function on a day-to-day basis. For me, it wasn’t recreational anymore. I had to do it.”
Brown’s wife, Alicia Etheredge, joined the red table
In 2009, Brown had a son named Cassius with Alicia Etheredge. The couple married on June 18, 2012, and have later welcomed two daughters, Bodhi and Hendrix. “She was a friend before we became lovers. That’s what I really love about your relationship. She gives me the energy to want to live right, to live righteous. I must commend good women for holding onto us knucklehead men and not giving up on u,” the singer said about his wife. “She helped me see the good in me that I forgot about. All I thought about was everything that I had done in my past. If I kept living in the past about what I had done in my previous relationships, I couldn’t see the sunshine from where I was standing,” he said. “I’m able to deal with everything that I had in my past and look forward to the future knowing that I have someone standing strong and no matter what, she’s there.”
She spoke about being by his side through the losses of his mom, dad, ex-wife, daughter, and son. Brown’s parents, Carole and Herbert Brown, died within a year of each other. His mom died in 2011, and his dad passed in January 2012, just a month before Houston’s death, and his daughter died three years later. When asked what provided to her husband when they first got together, she said: “Unconditional love, but really a reality check. He had a lot of ‘yes’ people. I’m not that one, you know? I’m very direct when something is out of place and definitely with red flags. I just want to be transparent and honest with him.”
The couple is working on breaking generational cycles together
They revealed that the whole family goes to therapy. The couple said that they each have their own therapist and see another therapist as a family. After Bobby Jr.’s death, the parents relied on their therapist’s help to speak openly to their 11-year-old son, Cassius, about how his big brother died. They also make it a point not to hide their emotions and to allow their children to see their father cry openly, and how that’s important, especially for a Black man, so that they see their parents experiencing real situations without having to hide. Etheredge said that it’s all about trusting the journey. “We’re a work in progress. Before therapy, we both had our way of communicating, and we didn’t often understand each other’s language, and that issue just bled and spread,” she said. The pair said they both learned how to communicate better, listen more, and find better ways to express their feelings. “I would hold in my feelings on how I would deal with the pressures of losing a child. Not wanting to speak, holding it in made me go in the corner and hide and drink,” Brown shared. “Thank God that I had someone like my wife to sit and wait for me to get that knowledge and gain that power to express myself.”
Brown’s youngest children and his wife inspired him to get clean
The R&B star is close to his two eldest children and hopes to have that same kind of relationship with his youngest. He said he quit drinking with them in mind. He didn’t want the same cycle to repeat after his parents’ struggle with an alcohol addiction that he says was passed down to him. “My kids were looking at me strange. When they see their father was losing bodily functions in front of them and I’m a grown man, and that was something I couldn’t accept for myself. I couldn’t accept going to the bathroom on myself,” he said, revealing that he has maintained his sobriety by using the 12 step program. “Seeing my 4-year-old, my five-year-old wake up in the morning and immediately come to wake me up, that lets me know that someone small depends on me.”
He said he plans to do things differently this time around with his youngest kids by changing his lifestyle. “I can only teach by example. That was the one thing I saw growing up in my household. I saw drug use. I saw robbery, death and killings, and things like that. I thought it was cool to smoke a joint and drink a pint of Hennesy and feel good at the time because that’s what I saw,” he said. “That’s all that I saw but realizing it was a generational disease that my father had. My dad was an alcoholic, my mom was an alcoholic, which was passed down. I realized that with my younger children that if I don’t break the cycle, then who is? I have to give them the reason to live clean. If I’m not right, nothing else is going to go right.”
He added: “I got second, third, fourth chances, at life, and I’m still here. There’s something that God wants me to do. I just ain’t done it yet. I’m just waiting to do it.”
If you or someone you know is struggling, please contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration hotline at 1-800-662-4357 or the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233).