It was July 10, 2007, and my life seemed perfect. As I drove away from my hairdresser’s shop, my mobile phone rang. I answered it to find my publicist, Danika Berry, on the other end of the line. “Hey, Danika,” I said.
“Hey, K. Where are you?” she asked.
“Ummm . . . I’m at the corner of Olympic and La Brea. Why? What’s up?”
“Perfect. I’m at this event at a spa, called Le Vie L’Orange, on Robertson Boulevard, and it’s really dead. Can you stop by?”
“Yeah. Sure. It’s on my way home, so I’ll stop by for a second.”
“Oh my God, thank you so much. See you in a minute.”
It was a hot summer day. My hair was freshly curled and my brand-new white Range Rover was newly detailed and glimmering in the Los Angeles sunshine. My sunroof was open and my music was blaring, the bass of my custom woofers announcing my arrival everywhere I went. Life was good and I was happy. Ecstatic. I had everything I wanted in life. I was a fixture on the New York Times Best Sellers list with my first book, Confessions of a Video Vixen, and with its proceeds, I’d recently purchased my first home, worth over one million dollars, on the hillside of a Los Angeles suburb, complete with a pool and all the privacy I needed for skinny-dipping. I was poised to publish my second book, The Vixen Diaries, and was on the cover of KING magazine with the headline “. . . the Bitch is Back.” I was floating. My life and the publishing industry had been good to me. I had just bought the custom Range Rover and also owned a brand-new Mercedes Benz SL550, each worth over one hundred thousand dollars. My son was enrolled in and attending the best school in the city and we needed for nothing. Professionally and financially, I had everything I’d ever dreamed of, plus a thriving relationship with entertainment’s foremost rising star, Lil’ Wayne.
Wayne and I had been dating since the beginning of 2007 and, though I was madly in love with him, there was a lot to be desired about being with a rapper who practically lived on his tour bus and traveled the world, sleeping with a different woman most every night. Still, he and the friendship we forged was important to me and I wasn’t prepared to let him go—not then, not ever.
On top of the world, I sauntered into the event and was instantly met by Danika and entertainment columnist Jawn Murray. Soon after arriving, my friend Omarosa Manigault showed up and soon it was like a family reunion. I wasn’t concerned with the spa or the event itself, but was content to just sit and chat with my friends. Still naive to the weight of my presence, I never realized that I was the main attraction that afternoon. I never realized what an oddity I was and how seeing me out and about was like happening upon a unicorn.
I never understood my worth.
About an hour after my arrival, I heard another familiar voice among the small group of people in attendance and knew instantly to whom the booming, attention-seeking voice belonged. Aeron Killian was a former child star, all grown up and living life as a series of stereotypes. He stood six-feet-four-inches tall, with dark brown skin, hands like a silverback gorilla, and a deep, bass-filled voice. Aeron and I had met seven years prior, in June 2000, at a local barbershop and hair salon, and instantly upon meeting him, I found him annoying. He had to cause a scene everywhere he went; he had to be the loudest and the center of attention. He spoke above everyone else and laughed uproariously, never allowing himself to be understated or demure. He acted as if life itself was a stage and he had a part to play.
We saw each other quite often at that barbershop, where I spent a lot of time hanging out with the men and women who worked there. I wore my hair in a pixie cut back then and would have it trimmed on the women’s side of the shop and then tapered on the men’s. My son, Naiim, was just two years old and received his first professional haircut at that shop. It was the kind of place where anyone could just hang out, whether being serviced or not, and it seemed as if I would run into Aeron once a week, every week, that summer.
Still, he never grew on me.
One evening, after the shop closed, a group of us left and went to a recording studio to continue hanging out. Once we arrived, it was easy to notice Aeron was already there, being his usual boisterous and annoying self, except it was all amplified, as he seemed to be under the influence of something—something that made him talk louder and faster than usual. After a few hours, Aeron fell asleep on a sofa in the building’s common area, and I decided to play a prank on the attention-craving former child actor. As he slept, his hands dangling off the edge of the couch, and with a crowd of acquaintances watching and snickering, I took a bottle of Wite-Out I found atop a nearby desk and proceeded to paint Aeron’s nails with the thick white liquid. The rest of the group burst out laughing and I couldn’t help but laugh, too. By the time Aeron awoke, the Wite-Out was dry and none of us had any recommendations on how he could remove the paint from his nails.
“Man! Who did this shit?” he grumbled as he rose from the sofa, looking at his nails. No one answered; we all just laughed. Aeron looked at me. “Did you do this?”
“I didn’t do shit!” I insisted as I grabbed my purse and headed out the door, fleeing the scene of the crime. It would be weeks later, back at the barbershop, before I admitted I was the culprit. To make up for the prank, I took an eight-by-ten, black-and-white photograph of myself from my car and scribbled upon it, Sorry for getting white stuff all over your fingers.
All was forgiven.
I’m sure I ran into Aeron several more times over the next seven years but each time I saw him, I could never recall when or where I saw him last. He just always seemed to be there. He was one of those people you’d see quite randomly about town and now here he was again. He was sitting in a barber’s chair at Le Vie L’Orange, ironically enough, having his haircut, when I walked past him during my tour of the salon and spa.
“Hey, girl! How have you been? God, I haven’t seen you in a minute!” he said, as our eyes met.
“I’ve seen you here and there, I’m sure, but one of the last times I remember seeing you was that time I painted your fingernails with Wite-Out,” I answered, chuckling at the thought.
“That’s right!” he exclaimed as he rose from the chair, his haircut complete. “I almost forgot about that! Man, do you know how hard it is to get Wite-Out off your nails? I had to walk around with that shit on my hands for damn near three weeks!”
I laughed so hard, my stomach ached, and I tried to issue a sincere apology through my cackle. “I am . . . so . . . sorry!”
Aeron reached into his pocket, pulled out a bottle of nasal spray, and squirted it into one nostril and then the next. I figured it was allergies. We struck up a conversation and for some reason after all those years, Aeron was attractive to me. He was tall and broad. He was strong and protective. He was tangible.
He wasn’t thousands of miles away, like Wayne.
Over the next several hours, we drank and talked and laughed and Aeron continued to inhale his nasal spray until the bottle was empty. “Come with me,” he insisted as he grabbed my hand and led me through the back door of the building. He walked me to his car, opened the driver’s side door, and removed a small bag of white powder from the center console. With his teeth, he removed the tip of the nose spray bottle, shook the white powder into it, and added a bit of water from a bottle he stashed in his car, before resealing and shaking the inhalant.
“Gotta take my medicine,” he said. He rubbed a bit of the white powder on his teeth before continuing. “Coke and a smile!”
The powder was cocaine and though this should have been the first red flag, I ignored his drug use and shrugged it off as a thing child stars do. After all, this is Hollywood! You can’t swing a bat in this town without hitting a cokehead, and we’ve all heard the stories of the lives child actors live once they become adults and their careers become obscure. I supposed it was all par for the course and decided to ignore it and enjoy his company, nonetheless. I was delighted just to have a regular conversation with someone. It had been years since I’d been engaged in such a way, as I’d spent most of that time on tour, being interviewed, poked and prodded by the public. My life changed drastically after the publication of Confessions of a Video Vixen and I’d found solace in my home, nestled in the suburban hills, when not on the road. But, soon, that solace turned into an anxious confinement.
My home became my hermitage.
I also felt a bond with Aeron because he’d been the victim of vicious rumors and was quite the social outcast. And I felt like an outcast. He wasn’t cool or trendy; he was awkward and dated, and I figured he and I were both outcasts in our own ways and he would understand what it was like to be attacked by people, as I had been attacked upon publishing Confessions in 2005. I figured, given his image in certain circles, he wouldn’t be in any position to judge me. He may have been a Goody Two-shoes to the general public, but people in the entertainment industry who knew Aeron shared stories of his abuse of the women he dated and his crazy mother. Sure, I’d heard all the rumors, but there were so many rumors floating around about me that I was more attracted to him because of this. I thought I’d found someone who could understand me, who wouldn’t attack me, someone who could relate to what I was going through at that stage of my life and career.
Old acquaintances and long-lost family members had been crawling out of the woodwork since Confessions, all wanting a piece of me. There were people I thought were my friends who proved otherwise, and a failed relationship that ended early in 2007 left me unsure of myself for a while. I was constantly berated by the public and crucified by millions for living my life much the way men do—without apology or regret. I was being called every horrible thing you could call a woman, every single day. People I didn’t know, all over the world, were throwing stones at me for simply telling the truth.
My truth.
I wasn’t the first to report from the misogynistic world of popular music and entertainment, but I surely wasn’t met with the celebratory awe that surrounded my predecessors like Pamela Des Barres, Cynthia Albritton, or even Devon Wilson—the black super groupie famous for her affairs with Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix. But those were different times. In 2005, I became public enemy number one while also becoming more successful than some of the men and the vast majority of the general public who deemed me as such. So, I took the bad with the good and hoped to find someone who would accept it all and give me stability outside the limelight.
For all the wonderful things that were happening to me, there were gaping holes in my life that needed to be filled, and Aeron appeared at just the right time—or maybe it was the wrong time. I couldn’t be sure. I’d been dating Wayne for just over six months and though I’d already fallen in love with him and had no intentions of leaving him, I had this incredible craving for normalcy, for my world to stop spinning. I went into my relationship with Wayne knowing I would always be one of many and that he and I would spend more time apart than together. I was lonely. I wanted someone local, someone reachable, someone normal with whom I could hole up when in Los Angeles. Aeron was the exact opposite of Wayne. He wasn’t powerful, he wasn’t rich, he wasn’t a star, and by the end of the event at Le Vie L’Orange, he was massaging my feet and I was calling him my husband. The desperation was palpable and the foreshadowing was unfortunate.
By the time the sun began to set, the event was nearing its end and I decided it was time to go. Aeron walked me to my car, refusing to say good-bye, and instead asked me to dinner. “Do you want to go grab something to eat in a little bit?”
“Yeah, sure. Just let me run home and change,” I suggested. I wore shorts and a spaghetti-strapped blouse that afternoon and wanted to wear something more appropriate for dinner and the chilly evening weather.
“That’s fine. I need to close out the event, anyway.” Aeron and his uncle were promoting the event as part of their new and soon failed event-planning venture. Aeron was always grasping at straws.
“Alright. So, I’ll meet you in about an hour and have Jawn come with us, too,” I suggested. Jawn and Aeron had known each other for years and I felt the need to have a buffer. Aeron was still the loud, hyper man I’d met years before, and after watching him spray cocaine into his nose, I wasn’t sure how stable or unstable the rest of the night would be.
“Okay. Let’s meet at Dan Tana’s, then.”
“Cool.”
Aeron leaned over and kissed me tenderly on the left corner of my lips. Internally, I melted and swooned, while being outwardly nonchalant. I don’t know what it was about him or about me that day, but something happened; something clicked. After finding him so obtuse from our very first encounter seven years before, he all of a sudden seemed right for me.
I didn’t know if any of the rumors about him were true. Rumors run wild in the entertainment business. I didn’t know much about him at all. But I guess it didn’t matter what I knew about him. What mattered was what I knew about me. I was looking for something familiar, something from before my fame. I was looking for someone from those barbershop days before I had money, before I had anything. Maybe I needed a touchstone, something and someone to make me feel normal. Maybe I needed someone who would just be there—someone who, unlike Wayne, wasn’t bigger than my life or me.
Whatever the reason, I ignored all the red flags. I kissed Aeron back and solidified our dinner plans for later, when what I should have done was left him right where I found him, as I always had before. It was that moment, that sliver of time right there, I wish I could take back. In that split second, I made the one decision that would change my life in ways no one could have predicted.