Dee Barnes Is the Truth on The Defiant Ones, HBO's Dr. Dre Documentary
Entertainment
On Allen Hughes’s The Defiant Ones, the four-part HBO series airing this week that traces the careers of Dr. Dre and Interscope boss Jimmy Iovine, hip-hop journalist Dee Barnes is positioned as an unimpeachable bearer of truth. Her authority is called upon several times during the second part of the series, which aired Monday—she explains how the success of J.J. Fad’s “Supersonic” paved the way for other Ruthless Records recordings by Dre and his crew (“A female group opened the door for N.W.A.”) and she discusses the attitudes of Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy E IRL (she was hanging out with them back before they blew up) versus their on-record personas.
Most crucially, Barnes’s account of being assaulted by Dr. Dre in 1991 is presented as gospel in The Defiant Ones. There’s no counter-narrative from Dre, no attempt to “hear both sides”—there’s Barnes’s story and then there’s Dre’s admission of fault and “atonement,” as Hughes described it to The Undefeated. You can watch how that plays out above.
Barnes went into greater detail about the assault and the toll it has taken on her career and health in a Gawker essay that ran soon after the 2015 release of the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, “Here’s What’s Missing From Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up.” (She is currently writing her memoir.) Since working on that piece with Barnes, I have kept in touch with her and yesterday, we discussed her participation in The Defiant Ones. She told me that the D.O.C., rapper and N.W.A. member, initially put her in contact with Hughes, with whom she met last year—her interview was filmed around the start of 2017. “I wanted to be there to represent the women,” she said of her participation in the documentary. (She referred to Hughes’s finished product as “a masterpiece.”)
I wondered what she thought about the fact that her incident with Dr. Dre was the only one profiled in The Defiant Ones, despite other women like Dre’s former collaborator/girlfriend Michel’le and one-time Ruthless artist Tairrie B having made similar claims.