Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Materials unravel Prince’s tortured existence
Revelations show facets of descent into addiction
MINNEAPOLIS — After Prince had to be revived from a drug overdose a week before his death, one friend told the musical superstar that he needed to stop taking painkillers.
But Prince said he couldn’t. His hands hurt so much that if he quit, he’d have to stop performing.
“This piano tour I think was getting to his hands,” singer Judith Hill told investigators, according to a transcript of her interview.
Those words, found amid hundreds of pages of interviews between investigators and Prince’s closest confidants, provide insight into just how much the man known for his energetic performances and largerthan-life personality was suffering. The documents open parts of Prince’s life that the intensely private celebrity tried to keep from even his closest confidants.
“How did he hide this so well?” Prince’s closest friend and bodyguard Kirk Johnson said in an interview with detectives. While Johnson said he didn’t realize that opioids were a problem until that overdose,he had noticed Prince was unwell before that and took him to a doctor.
In their zeal to protect Prince’s privacy, Carver County Attorney Mark Metz said, some of the singer’s friends might have enabled him.
Prince was 57 when he was found alone and unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park studio compound in suburban Minneapolis on April 21, 2016. An autopsy found that he died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin.
Authorities say it is likely Prince didn’t know he was taking the dangerous drug, which was laced in counterfeit pills made to look like a generic version of the painkiller Vicodin.
The source of those pills is unknown and no one has been charged in Prince’s death.
Authorities say Dr. Michael Todd Schulenberg admitted that he prescribed another drug, oxycodone, under Johnson’s name to protect Prince’s privacy. Schulenberg disputes that but paid $30,000 to settle allegations the drug was prescribed illegally.
Johnson and Hill were on Prince’s plane when he overdosed on the way back from an April 14, 2016, concert in Atlanta. Hill said that Prince told her he was depressed, enjoyed sleeping more than usual and was incredibly bored. He told her after his show that he thought he was going to fall asleep on stage.
The plane made an emergency landing in Moline, Illinois, and after Johnson carried Prince from the plane “like you would carry a little kid or a baby,” paramedics had to use two doses of a medicine that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose. When Prince took a large gasp of air and woke up, he looked at Johnson without saying anything and Johnson told paramedics, “Prince feels fine,” according to documents.
Investigative materials released Thursday include several other interviews, documents, photos and videos.
Johnson also called Schulenberg on the day of the Atlanta concert before the flight on which Prince overdosed and asked the doctor to give Prince a painkiller.
Meanwhile, Johnson and others had reached out to addiction specialist Howard Kornfeld, who dispatched his son to Paisley Park to try to persuade Prince to seek treatment.
Andrew Kornfeld showed up the following morning. He was among those who found Prince dead.