Showing posts with label VH1's Behind The Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label VH1's Behind The Music. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Overdose No Accident, Says Fantasia – 'I Wanted Out'

Two weeks after being hospitalized for overdosing on aspirin and a sleep aid, singer Fantasia Barrino says she knew exactly what she was doing. She wanted to die.

"I didn't have any fight in me. I didn't care about anything. I just wanted out," the American Idol winner, 26, tells VH1 in a new Behind the Music interview, airing 9:00 pm (ET/PT) Tuesday, the same day her new album, Back to Me, is released. "At that moment, I wanted out. I wanted it to be over with – all of it, all of that [expletive]."

She continues: "I just sat in the closet and looked at the mirror and took all the pills in the bottle. I wanted to go to sleep and just be at peace. I knew exactly what I was doing. You can't accidentally take a whole bottle of pills."

Barrino's manager, Brian Dickens, recalls finding her lying on the floor in her room. "Her emotions were extremely low," he says. "She'd been crying all day. Fantasia was just numb. Fantasia texted me, saying 'I love you.' I wrote back, 'I love you more.' Then it hit me."

"I wrote, 'You better not do anything or think about doing anything stupid.' And I left it at that. About 10 minutes later, Fantasia texted me back, and she said, 'Already did.' I went into Fantasia's room and saw her on the floor, and my heart just dropped."

What made the successful singer, who's preparing to release her third album, want to end her life? "I was tired of people doing me wrong, constantly, over and over again, dealing with my family – my father, dealing with men and their [expletive] – I was tired," she says. "My head was hurting me. I was over it."

Affair with Antwaun Cook

To complicate matters even more, Barrino is now being threatened with a lawsuit by Paula Cook, the wife of Antwaun Cook, with whom Fantasia had been having an affair.

"When I met him, he was separated ... wasn't living in his home. He didn't want to be back with his wife – that is what I was told," Barrino says. "I remember waking up in the hospital [and thinking], 'It didn't work, I'm still here in this hellhole. Still here with all this drama going on.' "

Ultimately, the singer says the saving grace was her nurse. "My nurse Melanie was a blessing into my life because she didn't tell me what I wanted to hear," she says. "She told me what I needed to hear. And she looked at me and said, 'You gotta get up, and you've gotta get out of here, 'cause you haven't fulfilled your destiny.' "

"I realized how people end up in the grave. Because that one moment [snaps her fingers] of just breaking or feeling like I can't, I can't go on, it's too heavy. That was somewhere I don't ever want to go again."

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Jennifer Hudson: Family Murders 'All a Blur'

She's kept quiet about the brutal 2008 murders of her mother Darnell, brother Jason and nephew Julian. Now, Jennifer Hudson is finally speaking out.

"It's all a blur, it was surreal," she says on VH1's Behind the Music: Jennifer Hudson on Monday night. "It was like I was outside of myself."

As her very public nightmare unfolded, the Oscar-winning actress says she went into seclusion.

"For almost two weeks straight . . . [I was] inside one room with just family and friends coming in and out," she says. "I prayed when I'd get up in the morning and prayed before I laid down at night."

Hudson barely addressed the murders until the 2009 Grammys, where she performed a poignant, moving rendition of "You Pulled Me Through."

"I was definitely thinking of my family when I was singing that song," she says. "I could hear my brother in my head, like, 'Jennifer, you need to kill this, you need to get up and do it.' I knew he would be disappointed if I didn't do it justice."

Today, "I feel like I've lived about three or four different lives," she says, adding that her 11-month-old son David (with her fiancé David Otunga) has helped her heal.

Little David, "reminds me of my nephew," says Hudson, and he also helps her remember her mother. "In so many ways I channel her because she was such a great mom."

Her son, she adds, "makes me feel like the most special person on earth. I want him to get the same love and the same upbringing my mother gave us."