‘Legal issues’ kept fam mum in Aaliyah bio
As the 20th anniversary of her death approaches, new details about late R&B star Aaliyah’s life are being revealed in a new unauthorized biography.
Written by Kathy Iandoli, “Baby Girl: Better Known as Aaliyah” includes never-before-told stories about the beloved singer, her relationships and the evolution of her career. The book also explores Aaliyah’s long-lasting influence since her death at 22 in a Bahamas plane crash on Aug. 25, 2001.
Published by Atria Books, the tome hit shelves Tuesday — the day before R. Kelly’s sex trafficking trial began in Brooklyn. In 1994, the Detroit-raised chanteuse (whose real name was Aaliyah Dana Haughton) wed the 27-year-old R&B hitmaker at age 15. The marriage was later annulled.
Iandoli (top), a writer for hiphop outlets such as AllHipHop.com and
The Source, previously penned the books “God
Save The Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-Hop” and “Commissary Kitchen: My Infamous Prison Cookbook” with Mobb Deep rapper Prodigy.
Her latest book covers many points of Aaliyah’s personal life and even the possibility that the late singer may have been drugged before boarding her final flight — topics and information her protective family members reportedly have allegedly kept private throughout the years.
The sought-after author understood why the family refused to participate in “Baby Girl” but did want to invite them into the process.
“I did reach out to the family for permission. It’s a strange legal situation involving the estate of Aaliyah, and I learned the complexities of this after Prodigy passed away, because you have the human and then you have the personality, the artist, the image,” she said in a Vanity Fair interview published last week.
“There’s a lot that I dig through in the book that explains why those are two very separate entities and why it’s not always a priority to get a blessing when you’re trying to highlight the essence of the celebrity, the story,” Iandoli continued. “But I have my suspicions about why they can’t speak on certain things or what their concerns are about certain things, and I do delve into that in the book, and a lot of it involves some legal issues.”
The 42-year-old New Jersey native stressed that she wanted to do her due diligence in trying to get Aaliyah’s family on board, but pulled from other sources.
“That was the first line, like I wanted that for myself as a person who respected her family, but it didn’t work out,” she confided. “But I didn’t want that to stop yet another part of glorifying Aaliyah, so I kept going. I did speak to people she worked with. I did what I had to do while still holding her up in the highest regard, and sometimes that involves having to tell certain parts of the story that have been kind of covered for so long. I think in order to get the panoramic view of just how dynamic she was, you have to show the peaks and valleys.”
The hip hop music authority feels that the death of Aaliyah, who remains an evergreen presence in R&B music, was overshadowed by the 9/11 attacks, so many fans “weren’t able to grieve.”
“What started to happen over the years was Aaliyah became an aesthetic, she became this like mythical creature, she became almost like a statue, a piece of iconography,” Iandoli said during a “Good Morning America” interview on Tuesday.