RIHANNA: FORCED TO RELIVE HER NIGHTMARE
Chris Brown opens old wounds by telling all about the night he beat up Rihanna
After that night, nothing would ever be the same again. Driving his Lamborghini home from a pre-grammys party on Feb. 8, 2009, Chris Brown got into a vicious argument with girlfriend Rihanna. When it was all over, she had been so savagely beaten that blood was splattered on the inside of the car, her face was bruised and battered beyond recognition (see photo, bottom right), and she was treated at a hospital. Chris pleaded guilty to felony assault, and his reputation was destroyed. “I felt like a f---ing monster,” says Chris. “That changed my life.”
And now for the first time, he’s revealing shocking and deeply personal details about that violent night — much to Rihanna’s horror. In the new documentary Chris Brown: Welcome to My Life, which was released on Aug. 8, Chris, 28, gives a graphic blow-by-blow account of exactly what happened in the car as well as troubling new information about the toxic on-andoff romance with the singer, 29. “Rihanna was totally caught off-guard by Chris,” an insider tells In Touch. After being forced to relive that nightmare all over again, adds the insider, “She is really upset. She never thought he’d bring up this terrible part of their past like this.”
What’s especially painful is that Chris claims the abuse went both ways. He recalls that on that fateful night, Rihanna read a text from a woman Chris had slept with before her, then threw the phone and started hitting him. “She tried to kick me, but then I really hit her, with a closed fist. Like, I punched her. And it busted her lip, and when I saw it, I was in shock. I was like,
‘F---, why the hell did I hit her?’” he says in the documentary, adding that she spit blood in his face, and “it enraged me even more.” She grabbed his genitals and he bit her arm and “pushed her head up against the window.” He pulled over on a residential street where Rihanna started screaming, “Help! He’s trying to kill me.”
He turned himself in shortly after. He was sentenced to five years probation, community labor and a year of counseling. But according to Chris, he and Rihanna had actually hurt each other many times before. “[There] would be verbal fights, physical fights as well. Mutual sides,” he says. “But it was never OK.”
And now Rihanna, who called the incident “humiliating,” feels like she’s being victimized all over again, says the insider. “Chris wants her to understand that he is doing this to have his own life and tell the truth, not to hurt her,” says the insider. “But her family is furious that Chris has rehashed all of this, and Rihanna is flipping out. I’m sure she thinks he’s trying to get sympathy and understanding after all these years.”
He’s also, incredibly, still trying to win her back. Chris, who confesses in the documentary that he still loves Rihanna, “is trying to take the next step and ask around if she would ever talk to him again,” say the insider. “But she wants nothing to do with him.” ◼