Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown, daughter of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, has been the pride and joy of the entertainment industry since the day she was born. The phrase ‘growing up in the limelight’ is an understatement for a kid with superstar parents best known for their star power and struggles with substance abuse.
On Saturday, the 21-year-old was found face down in a tub by her husband Nick Gordon. Now she clings to life in a Georgia hospital with her family gathered around hoping a medically-induced coma doctors have ordered will bring Bobbi Kristina back to full consciousness. This incident is scary not only because of the threat it poses to her health, but also because it comes just before the third anniversary of her mother Whitney’s death on February 11, 2012, when she too was found in a bathtub, having accidentally drowned due to a drug overdose.
Born on March 4, 1993, Krissy, as her family calls her, was introduced to many as an infant at the end of Bobby Brown’s 1993 “Something In Common” video, featuring Whitney and produced by Teddy “Rumpshaker” Riley. One year later, Whitney told Ebony in a 1994 cover story—called “The Awards, The Gossip, The Glory: Whitney’s Wild and Wonderful Year”—that she wanted to build her firstborn a “little house in the backyard and put her in it and say, ‘This is where you’re going to stay the rest of your life.'” The late icon wanted better for the daughter she kept by her side at recording sessions and on tour dates when the child wasn’t with her strong-willed grandmother, Cissy Houston.
Elsewhere in the Ebony feature, her parents fought to prove the media wrong about their love story’s ups and public downs.
“I know that they [the media] are trying to make my husband out to be this man who has no respect for his wife or his family, who has no respect for his marriage, who has no respect for too much of anything-but they’re very wrong,” she says … “They are plain on the fact that Bobby and I, no matter what people think or what the media will say, we’re happy together. And we like being together … We love each other.”
Whitney also addressed physical altercation rumors surrounding the family at the time.
“Me, a battered woman? Girl, please. No!” she responds. “Because [if that were the case] the next thing the media will say is, ‘Whitney has left.’ I wouldn’t stay around to be beaten; that’s not what I’m there for.”
Unfortunately, during a 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Whitney confirmed that Bobby Brown was verbally abusive often, and physically abusive once. She explained that he’d spat in her face in front of Bobbi Kristina, and that it was her daughter who’d urged her to leave their relationship.
“When we got back to the house,” Houston said, “he spit on me. He spit on me. He actually spit on me. And my daughter was coming down the stairs and she saw it. That was pretty intense. I didn’t grow up with that and I didn’t understand why that occurred – [why] he had such a hate for me because I loved him so much.”
As she grew up, Bobbi Kristina accompanied her parents at various events, though she was largely kept out of the public eye. But in 2005, the Bravo reality series Being Bobby Brown pulled back the curtain on her family’s life, often depicting Bobbi Kristina as a weary teen caught betwixt and between two wild and intoxicated adults.
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