I took the phone call in Vegas, and the first thing I thought was, “She’s dead.” First thing. Any rookie motorcycle rider taking on those winding mountain roads up at Big Bear is just asking for it. Sure, my wife, Michelle, was riding a bike known for its easy handling—a 1992 Harley Davidson Fat Boy—but it’s still a lot of motorcycle for a beginner to grapple with, all 650 pounds of it.
And there was another problem. The Fat Boy was one of my old bikes (I had given it to her for a birthday present), and the wingspan of the handlebars was perfect for a six-foot-eight guy with long arms—not so perfect for Michelle.
So the group left Running Spring, California, around noon, and about a mile out of town, Michelle was coming down the mountain, going too fast, trying to keep up with her friends—two guys and two girls. The road curved right, and she drifted across the centerline. She tried to pull the bike around, but couldn't manage the handlebars, and the goddamn thing was headed straight toward oncoming traffic. She over-corrected, hit the shoulder, and that was it. The Harley slid along the guardrail, hit a guardrail post, threw her, then slid another 40 feet. Meanwhile Michelle slammed into the guardrail, and her helmet popped off. If the guardrail isn’t there, she goes over the cliff and her ass is dead. Her friends called for help, and she was airlifted by helicopter to the emergency room at Loma Linda University Medical Center.
So I got the call, freaked out, and Thaer and I caught the first flight out of Vegas. At the time, Michelle and I weren’t even talking—not at all. It was the usual off and on, hot and cold shit. But she’s my wife and the mother of my kids.
We got to the hospital. She had a broken leg, collarbone, and ankle; two cracked vertebrae; assorted bruises; and bumps on her face that looked like cherries. But she was going to survive, make a full recovery. Now I was pissed. What was she thinking?
“Is it that serious?” she asked.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” the doctor said.
She was so out of it that she didn’t even know what had happened and thought she’d been in a car accident with the kids.
About a week later, after having a rod surgically implanted in her left leg, Michelle came home from the hospital in a wheelchair, wearing a neck brace. I knew she was going to be fine when she started bitching. She was all upset because I wasn’t “there” for her and the kids after the accident. Said her mother and her friends stepped in and took care of things while she “had no idea what I was doing. No idea.”
What I was doing was working to make money to pay her fucking hospital bills. Turned out Michelle had not made it down to our accountant’s office to sign some papers, and she didn’t have health insurance. I still don’t know how much that’s going cost me, somewhere around $100,000.
Later, Michelle said the accident was a big turning point for her in our relationship. She was like, “That’s it. Done!” Again, because I wasn’t “there” for her.
Well who does she think called her mother in Seattle and flew her ass down? As for the kids, I was “there” most every day when Michelle was in the hospital. Not that I had shit to do. The nanny didn’t need a lot of help. Anyway, I am always taking care of my kids. They live in a nice house. They have nice clothes. They’ve got everything they want in the world.
Of course, if you’re a man, you know all that doesn’t mean shit. You can talk yourself silly, present evidence, pile up the facts, whatever: she’s still right, you’re still wrong, get over it. If you ever want to get laid again, you best start groveling. No big deal. For the past few years, it seems like Michelle and I are always in the middle of either breaking up or getting back together. It wasn’t that way in the beginning.
I don’t remember any of this, but Michelle claims she first laid eyes on me at the Cheesecake Factory in the Fashion Island Shopping Center in Newport Beach in 1997. She was there with a guy friend, and she says we started talking, something about her tattoos and piercings, me using my usual colorful language, “motherfucker” this and “motherfucker” that.
Then I asked the guy, “This your wife?”
He was like, “No. If she were you wouldn’t be disrespecting her like that.”
There was a little more jawing back and forth, and that was it.
A couple of years later I was at Margaritaville in Newport Beach with Jeremy Gallagher and a couple of other friends listening to—I think it was the Blue Machine band—and throwing back a few Redheaded Sluts, a concoction made out of Jägermeister, cranberry juice, and peach schnapps. Michelle and her way-hot girlfriend walked by. Everybody was drooling over the girlfriend, but Michelle kept parading back and forth, trying to get our attention.
After a while, I got up to go talk to the girlfriend, but suddenly Michelle was in my face—at least that’s the way I remember it. Michelle says I called her over to the table. Whatever. We all ended up drinking Kamakazis, having a good ole time.
Later we left Margaritaville and went down to a club called White House in Laguna Beach. Michelle got lucky. Her husband had left the place five minutes before we got there. Unfortunately, his best friend was still around, and he tried to drag Michelle out of my pick-up truck. She kicked him away and told him to “Fuck off!” Words were exchanged, but the guy was outnumbered, so he disappeared. Shortly thereafter, Michelle started getting phone calls from her husband. She was like, “Screw you. I’m staying with Dennis.”
He kept calling.
She kept hanging up on him.
“I felt like I was in high school,” recalled Jeremy.
Meanwhile, Michelle’s way-hot girlfriend got sick, threw up, and went home. Michelle stayed and ended up going to the beach house with me. She was married. I was still with Carmen Electra.
“We were both being bad,” said Michelle.
Some badder than others.
So we were in my bedroom going at it, and her phone rings again. She answers it again. Guess who? She told him not to call back, and we went on about our business. I was thinking, “This is the kind of girl I like. Fucking bold as hell.”
This was in December of 1999. We started seeing each other, but then I signed with the Mavericks and was off to Dallas. We kept up a phone relationship, and I called her one day, said, “What’s up?” She was like, “My husband beat my ass.” She claimed he had broken her nose in two places. I can’t vouch for that, never saw her, but at the time, I took her word for it.
“Well, go to my house and stay there, and I’ll take care of you,” I said.
So I moved her and her 10-year-old daughter into the beach house, and I was a big hero. “My knight in shining armor,” she called me. I’ve met girls like Michelle all my life, seen them leave their husbands because of me. Most of the time, I was like, “Not my problem.” I didn’t want to be tied down. But for some reason, I felt sorry for Michelle.
After I moved home from Dallas in March, I got Michelle and her kid a place in Mission Viejo. She said she hated her job, so I told her to quit and hang out with me. Normally that would be the last thing I wanted, but there was something about this girl.
Michelle soon got an up close-and-personal look at the Dennis Rodman lifestyle.
Here’s a couple of quick stories.
Even though Michelle and I were sleeping together, Carmen was my number-one girl at the time. Michelle was cool with it. How cool? One time when I couldn’t drive because my license had been suspended, she actually chauffeured me up to L.A. to see Ms. Electra. Another day when Carmen showed up unannounced at the beach house for a barbeque, Michelle hid next door. Eventually she left, and Carmen stayed. That was the pecking order, and everybody knew it. After hanging with me awhile, Michelle not only knew her place, she knew that when it came to relationships, nothing was sacred, and nothing was permanent.
“She knew exactly what Dennis Rodman was about,” Thaer recalled. “She read his books. She saw him every day.
“She got involved in a relationship with her eyes wide open,” Thaer continued. “And she knew all these other women couldn’t change him. If Carmen Electra couldn’t change him, how did she think she was going to change him?”
“Yeah, I knew how he was. I was just praying that things would change,” Michelle told a reporter. “Any woman wants to believe that she’s gonna be the one that is different for him. And I did, I did believe that.
“I was in denial,” she continued. “I didn’t want to believe he actually had these other women. And what I didn’t see didn’t hurt me.”
Six months after I got back from Dallas, I was sitting in Josh Slocum’s one afternoon, minding my own business, and this girl who had been hanging out with us came in and said, “Congratulations on you guys having a baby.”
I was like, “Who you talkin’ to? Me? You talkin’ to me? I’m not havin’ no fuckin’ baby.”
She said, “Well, Michelle just said she’s three months’ pregnant.”
I was like, “What?”
Michelle was still married, for God’s sake. We were nowhere near being an official “couple.” I was beyond pissed. Some days I think Michelle got pregnant on purpose. Some days I don’t. Every day I’m glad she did. D.J. has always been a joy. In fact, I loved D.J. so much, Michelle and I planned the second baby. The way I looked at it, “We got one; why don’t we have another one? Fuck it.” So not long after D.J. was born on April 25, 2001, Michelle got pregnant with Trinity.
Then I took it to a whole new level.
While Michelle was still pregnant, I called her on the phone one day and said, “Open your door.” Out on her doorstep, she found a Faberge egg and a note. “Will you marry me?” the note read. Inside the egg, an engagement ring. Two years later, already the proud parents of two, we were married at the Orange County Courthouse. A year after that, Michelle filed for divorce.
This was in the spring of 2004, after I had stopped drinking. So I asked her, “Why do you want a divorce now that I’m sober?”
“You aren’t treating me right,” she replied.
I was like, “Well how the fuck you want me to treat you?”
She had a long list of things she wanted me to do to prove to her that I really wanted a wife and family: get rid of the beach house, spend more time with her and the kids, go to church. So I did all that and more.
As Thaer told a reporter, “He does whatever a girl tells him to do when she’s leavin’ him. He does that over and over again.”
“He’s changed completely to try to make this work,” Michelle said. “He stopped drinking. He sold his crazy beach house. He tried to make a life for us.
“He did everything he could to prove to me that he wanted me back and he wanted a family,” Michelle continued. “He went on shows—Howard Stern called me to try to get us back together. He went on television shows with shirts with my face on the front of them that he had made to try to prove to me that he was for real. Pretty cute things.”
After I sold the beach house, I was ready for us to buy a house together, but Michelle wanted to rent for a year to see if it was going to work out. So that’s how we ended up in the house in Huntington Beach. I also asked my mother for help in saving the marriage. My mother and I had a falling out when she took my sister Debra’s side after I fired her as my business manager a few years back. But I swallowed my pride and gave her a phone call for the first time in like five years.
“Could you talk to my wife? Let her know I’m serious,” I said. “Explain to her that she’s the only person who understands me.”
She called and left a message. Michelle didn’t call back.
There were two more things I did to get Michelle back. I took her on a belated honeymoon to Hawaii, and then came the capper, something I picked up from an old transvestite friend, and, trust me, bro, it was better than 1,000 empty promises. I went into Michelle’s closet and took one shoe out of every shoe box, must have been a hundred of them. I made a Polaroid picture of each shoe and pasted it on the end of the box and surprised her with a super-organized shoe closet when she got back from church.
Home run.
So I got her back, and things were good for about two seconds. Then I started drifting again—back to my old tricks—never at home, ignoring her and the kids, stopped going to church.
“If he’s after her, she’s running,” said Jeremy. “If she’s after him, he’s not really running, he’s just still being Dennis.”
By now, you know that “just being Dennis” is code for a lifestyle that includes sleeping around. So Michelle was already pissed before she had the motorcycle accident on May 30, and then came the last straw, when in her mind, I was not “there for her” when she was laid up. She was telling everybody, “He didn’t do a damn thing. And that’s why we’re where we are right now.”
Where we were was right back where we started when she filed for divorce in 2004. Michelle still wanted a normal life, and I was not giving it to her. Or at least that’s what she said.
“I’m your wife,” she said. “You need to include me in your life. I’m a part of you.”
I went for the full-court press this time. I asked her to renew our vows in Hawaii, promised to finally get that will taken care of and buy that house together like we’d been talking about. I was willing to do whatever it took to make Michelle see that I was serious about us being together, being a family.
I told her, “I think it’s kind of fucked up how we’ve been living our lives the last five years, and we should plan on just saying ‘Fuck it!’ and being together forever. Let’s just go do it and do it right and make it official, let people know that we’re married.”
All my friends were telling me I was crazy, that the woman was jerking me around.
“I think Dennis’s issue, anytime a woman treats him like shit,” Darren told a reporter. “He respects them more, because it reminds him of his relationship with his mom.”
Darren wasn’t alone. Everybody was saying she treats you bad, that’s why you stay with her. Nope. That has nothing to do with it. I stay with her because I love her. She’s probably the only girl with whom I’ve shared a real, clear connection.
And if we ever get our shit together, this could turn out to be a life-long relationship. Michelle is hopeful. “I think that honestly that Dennis and I will always be,” she said. “We’ll always be. We will be together for good.
“We love each other, love each other to death,” she continued. “Everything’s good. Everything. Everything.”
So despite all the fussing and fighting, coming and going, I love Michelle, and Michelle loves me. This much we know is true.
So we’re talking “happily ever after,” right?
Wrong.
Reality Check: Just because something is true, doesn’t mean it’s the “truth.”
