‘My boss was wealthy, successful, a black hero – and a rapist’
As the documentary On The Record, which details rape allegations against the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, is released, Drew Dixon tells Anna Silverman about the difficulty of speaking out as a Black woman
it took drew dixon 22 years before she felt able to speak about what she says happened to her in 1995. She had recently landed her dream job as an A&R executive at the hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings; her boss was the ‘godfather of hip-hop’ Russell Simmons, who signed everyone from the Beastie Boys to Kanye West. Drew was 24 and her career was going very well. She was working with the likes of Mary J Blige and Tupac; Biggie Smalls was a close friend, and she was already the brains behind a Grammy-award winning record.
But she says she had to do her dream job under the constant spectre of sexual harassment from her music mogul boss. First, she says Simmons began making inappropriate comments to her between their conference calls. Then, she says, he started exposing himself and getting physical. ‘Afterwards he would apologise and green light a project I wanted to do,’ she says, speaking from Brooklyn, New York, where she lives.
Then, one night, she alleges Simmons raped her. After a group night out in a trendy East Village bar in New York, he persuaded her to come up to his apartment so he could play her a demo. Next thing she knew he was naked, wearing a condom and wrestling her on to the bed. She says he pinned her down while she was fighting and saying no. She blacked out, a common self-preservation tactic of survivors. When she came around, she was naked in his bath and says he was talking about how they were going to ‘hang out and fuck all the time’. She got out, gathered up her clothes and walked 22 blocks home.
‘When it happened and I’m walking home and I’m soaking wet and I literally wanted to die I was mad at myself for being tricked,’ she says. ‘And I also didn’t know for 22 years if he’d done it to other people, so I was also like, “What is wrong with me that he thought I was somebody he could do this to?” I thought it was something about me that made me
unworthy and made me rapeable.’
Drew, who is 49 now, didn’t go to the police at the time because she didn’t think anyone would take her seriously. It wasn’t until other stories started to emerge about Simmons in 2017, in the aftermath of the accusations against Harvey Weinstein, that a lightbulb went off.
‘I realised, “Wait, this isn’t about me. This is about him. He’s a predator and I just happened to get caught in the latest in a series of traps”.’
After hearing about the other accusations against Simmons, she joined three women in telling their stories about him to The New York Times in December 2017. Simmons released a statement to the paper vehemently denying all the allegations, saying, ‘These horrific accusations have shocked me to my core and all of my relations have been consensual.’ Drew can’t bring legal claims against him as the statute of limitations in New York for rape is a maximum of 20 years.
‘I just felt an obligation,’ she says of speaking out. ‘I realised I had to protect the credibility of these other women because I knew they weren’t lying because their circumstances were so similar to mine.’
Now, as the documentary On The Record is released in the UK, which recounts the experience she and three other women (Sil Lai Abrams, Alexia Norton Jones, and Sheri Hines) say they had with Simmons, Drew says she’s been disappointed by the mixed response it has received. The reaction from other survivors of rape has been overwhelmingly positive. But what’s been frustrating, she says, is the lack of a response from the major Black influencers, icons and media platforms.
‘It’s concerning for me because I worry that this is going to intimidate, silence and re-victimise other Black survivors,’ she says. She’s disappointed that prominent voices in the Black community are talking about the important ways that we need to tackle systemic racism with the Black Lives Matter movement at the moment, but ‘at the same time avoiding any comment in support of Black women or survivors of the patriarchy within the Black community,’ she explains.
‘If we’re talking about tearing down statues of Confederate soldiers who raped our ancestors, I think it’s important to also de-platform living, breathing men who have raped Black women who are walking among us today,’ she says. ‘As Black people asking white allies to take on systemic racism, I think we also have to call on each other to take on the patriarchy.’
Why does she think some people are staying silent?
‘There’s this race loyalty, where you want to avoid doing anything to add to the dangerous myth that Black men are dangerous, hyper-sexual and predators, which is obviously, patently false. But it doesn’t mean that there aren’t examples of Black men abusing Black women that then we kind of brush under the rug because we are so conscious of the vulnerability of Black men and boys.’
She thinks there’s another issue at play, too. ‘Where Harvey Weinstein is one of hundreds of powerful white men in the entertainment industry, Russell Simmons is one of, like, five, if you want to talk about people in our community who reached that level of status, wealth and impact. Black people have no heroes to spare. We just don’t get that many success stories of that magnitude so we’re a lot more reluctant to abandon one of our massive heroes and success stories.’
When it comes to whether there are more #Metoo stories about the music industry to come, she believes we are just scratching the surface. In addition to Simmons, Drew alleges she was harassed by the music mogul L.A. Reid a few years later. Reid, who worked with everyone from Whitney Houston to Rihanna, denied her allegations.
After handing in her resignation at Def
Jam soon after the alleged rape, she started working at Arista Records, where she had a run of hits, including Whitney Houston’s
My Love Is Your Love. In 2000, L.A. Reid, who discovered Outkast, Usher and TLC to name a few, became the new boss of Arista and quickly started behaving inappropriately with her, she alleges. When she refused his advances, she said he turned nasty. After a decade of working her way up in the industry she was so passionate about, she quit. ‘I was harassed in a way that ultimately ended my career,’ she says. In a statement to The New York Times, Reid did not address the specific claims but apologised if his words were ‘misinterpreted’.
It was after this alleged harassment that Drew left the recording industry entirely. She’s been a stay-at-home mum to her two children for the past 16 years ‘because I walked away from my career,’ she says.
Watching On The Record, it’s clear Drew was destined to go far; in the documentary, various people attest to her talent, which only makes it more tragic that her time in the music industry was derailed. Now, though, she is beginning to work in music again. She’s managing a singer called Ella Wylde and has started a label called the 9th Floor. But she says she’s still considered ‘radioactive’ and is being shunned. ‘When you are raped and harassed by really powerful people in your industry, there’s the trauma of the rape and harassment, but then there are the lifelong repercussions for you professionally,’ she says.
However, she’s feeling ‘awake again’ – she is currently developing a TV show about young women in the hip-hop industry in the ’90s, and is working on a book.
‘It’s like I woke up from a trance. I gave up on myself,’ she says. ‘I’m back. I’m just doing a lot of different things to channel all of the creative energy that I have been supressing for decades.’
We’ll never know which artists Drew might have gone on to discover, but instead of focusing on her crushed career, it’s spreading a message about the importance of listening to other women of colour that seems to be her priority now.
‘I’m concerned that at the moment the Black Lives Matter movement, as it currently occupies a well-deserved, long overdue space, is very male-centric – and it’s really not OK. Black women matter, too.’
‘On The Record’ is available for rent and purchase in the UK on all digital distributors