Last month, Chrisette Michele gave her fans a pleasant surprise when she revealed that she’d gotten engaged to her boyfriend, music producer and manager Doug Ellison. At the time, little was known about him or their relationship, but now Michele has shared details about their engagement, including the fact that the couple once stopped speaking to each other for seven years.
In a recent interview with Mara The Hip Hop Socialite, Michele explained how her relationship with Ellison began years ago.
“Things started off in a romantic direction. We were in school for music — he was in school studying business, and I was in school studying the music side of business — and we hit it off kind of right away. He said, give me some time … he said, give me a year, and I’ll have you signed to a major label. And I kind of didn’t want to be signed to a major label at the time, and I just wanted to sing. He had about two weeks, and I was signed to Def Jam, so that was the beginning of our business relationship,” Michele said.
However, their romantic relationship tanked when their business relationship began to go south.
“Early on to the business relationship, things got crazy! If you’ve never read about it, if you’ve never heard about it, we were in the midst of a crazy, crazy lawsuit, litigation situation with each other, and we hadn’t spoken for literally seven years. I finally walked away from the major record label side of the business and started my own label, Rich Hipster, which got signed right away to Caroline/Capital Records. I had fun with it, but I knew something was missing,” she explained.
Michele says that’s when she decided to contact Ellison and get him on board with Rich Hipster. However, things took a surprising turn when they got in touch with each other.
“I called Doug, and after speaking to him for only a couple of hours, we were inseparable again. It’s the craziest, weirdest thing because we had gone through all that together,” Michele shared.
Well, the story of Michele’s roller-coaster romance doesn’t end there. Read about how Ellison proposed to her after the cut.
