Denise ‘Dee’ Barnes, a popular host, journalist, and rapper, is speaking out against the Recording Academy after they recognized Dr. Dre for the Global Impact Award during this year’s Grammy awards ceremony. Dr. Dre was accused of physically assaulting Barnes at an industry party back in 1991. Barnes believes she was blacklisted from the industry for filing charges against Dre and stated that the Grammys “named this award after an abuser.”
Barnes shared with Complex magazine how daunting it was to see him celebrated. “Everybody wants to separate the art from the artist, and sometimes that’s just not possible — most people without knowledge of [Dr. Dre’s] history are going to say, ‘Oh, he must deserve that, and he must be such a great person for them to put an award in his name.’ But they named this award after an abuser,” she stated. “He said it himself in the documentary ‘The Defiant Ones,’ ”I’m a blemish’ “.
In a 2015 New York Times feature, Dre apologized but did not identify who he was apologizing to. The claims of abuse shared by Barnes in the documentary include that Dre dragged her by her hair and smashed her face into a wall. She shared that he allegedly kicked her while she was on the ground and stomped on her fingers.
Dr. Dre has won seven Grammy awards and was recognized on Feb. 5 for his multitude of achievements in music. Having a multi-decade career, Dre shared at the podium how he started his music career solely off wanting to buy a new pair of shoes. “I studied engineering for years and years and years, and from there, I realized that I could take or hear a snippet of a sound and use that to create something entirely new. And then boom — I became a producer.”
