Miami, Friday, November 5, 1999. According to police reports, she—Patrick, Tara Leigh, “alias Carmen Electra”—and I— Rodman, Dennis Keith, “alias ‘The Worm,’”—had very different versions of what exactly led to the late-night brawl. About all we agreed on was that we had been clubbing and drinking the night away in South Beach before returning to Room 302—my suite at the swanky Bentley Hotel—around 4:30 a.m.
I was in town to work on a movie called Cutaway, starring me, Tom Berenger and Stephen Baldwin. The script involved a skydiving cop putting the hurt on skydiving drug dealers or something like that. Carmen had come down to visit, and we were all staying at the Miccosukee Resort and Convention Center, a Miccosukee-Indian-run hotel in the Everglades National Park near our shooting location. I soon decided that was too far from the action, and I booked us another set of rooms at the Bentley in South Beach. That’s where we were when the brouhaha began.
In Carmen’s version, we were “watching MTV together when Co-Defendant [me] became agitated when Defendant’s [Carmen’s] ex-boyfriend appeared in a video.”
I was supposed to have said, “You fucking whore! Get the fuck out! Go with Fred!”
(That would be Fred Durst of the rock band Limp Bizkit.)
This was all total horseshit—pure fiction—not that I did any better.
I told the cops that the “Defendant” (that would be me) was asleep—passed out actually—when “Co-Defendant (Carmen) began poking Defendant with a rose stem.”
That too was horseshit.
Here was when what we told the cops and the truth began to converge.
Big picture: For whatever reason, a knockdown, drag-out fight ensued that went up one side that hotel and down the other. I really don’t remember much of this, a fleeting detail here and there— forget the sequence of events—since I was, you guessed it, “shitfaced.”
Here’s a blow-by-blow pieced together using media accounts, the statements Carmen and I gave to the cops, and Thaer Mustafa’s recollections.
First, after the opening blow-up, Carmen claimed that I “forcibly escorted” her out of my room onto a “concrete walkway,” where she cut her toe. I then “slammed the door.” She came storming back inside, “punching Co-Defendant about his body [yelling], ‘How could you do this to me?’” as my statement put it.
We then “began to wrestle on the bed.” Carmen claimed she got “hit on the left side of her head”—could have happened, but it wasn’t on purpose—and “in fear for her safety, fled the hotel room and went upstairs to Witness #1’s [that would be Thaer’s] room.”
Now, anyone who believes Carmen Electra was “in fear for her safety,” wasn’t there and obviously doesn’t know the girl. This 110-pound hellion jumped my 230-pound ass, and it was all I could do to keep her off me.
That I remember.
So Carmen “fled” to Thaer’s room, by her account, telling the cops she wanted him to help her get the hell out of there. I stomped in.
“‘You want your fucking purse?’” I supposedly yelled.
I “threw her black purse at her, hitting her in the face.” That resulted in a “fat lip” as the New York Post phrased it. Then Carmen “fled to the lobby and waited for her limousine.”
I was right behind her.
“Look in your purse,” I yelled. “You’re not going anywhere.” I had hidden her identification, passport, and credit cards. Somewhere in the report, Carmen claims that I “tore a silver chain off her neck.” Anyway, I didn’t want her to go, so I asked the desk clerk to call the cops. That was likely redundant. This was around seven o’clock in the morning, and by then, we’d been raising hell for a couple of hours. Anyway, Thaer was like, “Bad idea on the cop-calling thing,” and he was trying to get Carmen out of there before they arrived to keep her from being arrested. Still under the influence, I was thinking, “If the cops come, she’ll have to stay, and we can work this thing out.”
Stupid.
Meanwhile Thaer finds Carmen’s identification and stuff where I hid it—in the bottom of one of those big cylindrical ashtrays with sand in the top—and loads Carmen into a limo for her ride to the Miccosukee Hotel.
The cops arrived at Room 302 to find me “lying on the floor behind the door.” Why? Only Herr Jägermeister knows. They reported that “the room was in disarray.”
I’ll say. The place was trashed. It was so bad that it looked like we had been having sex in there. Officer Paul Acosta took my statement, the cops talked the limo driver into bringing Carmen back, and Officer Christi Tanner took her statement. Officer Tanner then moved on to Thaer and took his statement.
“I told her the whole story—almost,” Thaer recalled. “I left out a couple of things, like the pasta thing. I told her everything else.”
“The pasta thing.” Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s start over.
Flashback to 4:30 a.m. in Room 302, the Bentley Luxury Suites Hotel: I was passed out face down on the bed. Carmen undressed me, and for reasons unknown, decided to give me a sponge bath. When she was done, she was telling Thaer—why he was there I don’t know—that as wonderfully nasty and kinky as I was in bed, you’d think I would grant her this one little indulgence. Then she told him what she planned on doing.
Thaer was like, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
She was like, “He’s not going to do anything, he’s passed out.”
Thaer says she started looking around in the kitchen for something suitable. She found this box of pasta—penne pasta—in this gift basket that had probably been there for years.
Thaer was still saying, “No, you’re not—this is a really bad idea.”
But she was saying, “Yes, I am; he never lets me do this to him.”
Now all of us have things we will and won’t do, like and don’t like in bed. And sometimes you and your partner just have to agree to disagree. That’s the way it was with Carmen and me—until then.
The woman is on record as saying I have “a nice butt.”
A little too nice apparently.
For whatever twisted reason, Carmen would occasionally ask me to let her—“Won’t hurt a bit!”—shove things up my “nice butt.” But I was like, “No. No. No. Homey don’t play dat.”
My life-long policy has been, if you’re going to be inserting anything in Dennis Rodman’s butt, it best be in a hospital setting, and involve a fistful of K-Y jelly and a board-certified proctologist.
Carmen was like, “Whatever.”
So the woman takes this piece of penne pasta—this uncooked, hard edged, penne pasta, a couple of inches long—and sticks it where the sun don’t shine. Well now, I felt that sharp edge in my tender parts, and I came out of that bed flailing.
“What the fuck?”
I accidentally sent Carmen’s tiny little ass flying. Thaer says she actually went airborne. I was trying to wake up, didn’t even know I hit her. She landed on both feet and came back at me like a wounded wolverine, freaking out, hitting and slapping, trying to get at my face, yelling and screaming. I was wide awake by now, standing, buck naked, just trying to keep this whirling dervish off my ass. She was pissed because I hit her, and I was pissed—well you know why I was pissed. After a few minutes, Thaer waded in, broke it up, and took her upstairs to his room to calm her down. Then he came to check on me, and she was right behind him, still screaming. Thaer took her back up to his room and gets her calmed down again. Then I showed up in his room doing a little screaming of my own. That was when I must have thrown the purse.
“You shouldn’t have hit me!” she screamed.
“You shouldn’t have—you know!” I replied.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Her room.
Thaer’s room.
My room.
The halls.
The balconies.
The lobby.
Somewhere in here, the $25,000 Rolex I had given her sailed over a balcony railing, and Thaer was out there in the bushes trying to find it. Somebody called the cops (could have been anybody, we woke up the whole hotel) about the “domestic disturbance” (wasn’t anything “domesticated” about it).
Finally, after a couple of hours of this shit, things were on an even keel, and we were waiting in the lobby for the limo to take Carmen back to the Miccosukee. The hotel security guard was standing around, and Carmen started telling her story.
“Dennis hit me,” she said. “He did this, he did that.”
The guard looked at me, looked Carmen up and down, and said, “You probably deserved it.”
Oh shit!
That did it. Looking back, I’m thinking the security guard was right. She probably did deserve it. I mean, a man’s butt is his castle, but that wasn’t something anybody needed to be saying aloud—not to a crazy woman. Carmen went absolutely nuts, ratcheting up to an entirely new level of full-throttle, fucking berserk.
When the limo finally arrived, Thaer literally had to pick the woman up and carry her to the car. She made her getaway, driving right by the arriving cops.
As I said, the cops talked to me, then they got on the phone with Carmen’s limo driver. First, the driver claimed he didn’t know where she was. Thaer had told him to keep driving, no matter what, determined to keep Carmen and me apart. But the cops were saying, “You don’t bring her back, you’re going to jail too.” So they talked to Carmen.
All the cops knew was that two people were fighting, one a six-foot-eight man, the other a tiny woman. They didn’t care who was at fault or the extent of the injuries—the cops told CNN there was “very minor facial scratching, very minor”—domestic violence was domestic violence. So when they finished listening, the cops decided they had a genuine case of “domestic battery” on their hands. They handcuffed Carmen and me and hauled us off to the Miami-Dade County Jail where we had our pictures taken.
These mug shots are far from “Nick Noltes,” but they are memorable. I was wearing this shit-eating grin, looking like I’m really happy to be there. Carmen looks like she could be coaxed into a smile. If her lip was swollen, it didn’t show. The only good thing to come out of this phase of our little adventure was the “note” that Officer Christi Tanner wrote to close out my official police statement.
NOTE: After being brought to the Miami-Dade County Jail’s holding facility, Defendant stated to please tell the Co-Def that he was sorry, that he overreacted, and that he loved her.
Two nights before this run-in with the law, I had met attorney Roy Black at a Miami club. Black is the guy who saved William Kennedy Smith’s ass following rape charges in West Palm Beach a few years ago. He has also represented actor Kelsey Grammer, artist Peter Max, and sportscaster Marv Albert.
He gave me his card and said, “One of these days you’re going to need me. Hang onto that card.”
So it was Roy Black to the rescue. He sprung us for $25,000 apiece with an agreement to stay at least 500 yards from each other for 30 days.
“Charging them with this is an overreaction,” he told the media. “Both of them are upset; they’ve been charged, and Dennis is more upset that she’s been charged.
“They both told me that this was a misunderstanding between the two of them,” continued Black.
I’ll say—a misunderstanding about my butt.
They let us loose that afternoon.
“I’m sorry. It was just one of those situations,” I told the media before leaving in a “white Mercedes,” while Carmen took off in a “Chevy Blazer.”
Thaer and I went back to the Miccosukee, and all I wanted to do was see Carmen, talk to Carmen—but her publicist booked her on a flight out of there. After that, we were talking every day, pushing Roy Black to get the separation order lifted. That was all we wanted. We wanted to be together. About three weeks later, prosecutors dropped the charges.
“There simply wasn’t a crime,” said Black, “But because of their celebrity, everyone took notice.
“[It’s] typical of what happens between a married couple,” Black continued.
What a fucking night.
Reality Check: Never pass out lying on your stomach.
In the battle of Miami, there were tons of fireworks, tons of light and noise, but no real damage was done—just two crazy motherfuckers having at it in a balmy climate. The real battles—the ones with the heavy artillery when the buildings were leveled and lives were lost—were triggered not by unofficial uses of pasta. The real battles, the only battles that ever mattered, were about one thing only: other women.
When I was single, I always had one main girl that I’d kind of cling to, and with the rest of them, I just had sex. The main girl usually wouldn’t be sleeping with anybody else, but I would be. She would know I was fooling around, but she didn’t care—or at least she wasn’t telling me if she did. Some girls even seemed turned on by my philandering.
When I hooked up with Carmen, she became the main girl, and I just kept on doing what I had always been doing—didn’t see any reason to change. Same thing after we were married. Carmen wasn’t cool with that. Back in January of 1999, reported the New York Post, she told Howard Stern, “If I found out he was cheating on me, I’d leave him. I’m not going to put up with that.”
Still, the entire time that I was with Carmen, I couldn’t— wouldn’t—stop sleeping with other women. So a couple of things came down, and Carmen was like, “You’re going to have to change your ways.”
I’m trying to make her believe “It’ll never happen again, it’ll never happen again.” Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, “It’ll never stop happening. That’s who I am.”
Sometimes I wish I could actually be with one person. I’ve had the opportunity many, many times, but that isn’t my lifestyle. Carmen wanted me to live with her, but I never did. If I had, if we had gotten a feel for each other that way, I think we’d still be married. But my lifestyle isn’t to settle down with one woman, you know? My lifestyle is to go out there and be Dennis Rodman—be who I am. In my line of work, Dennis Rodman is expected to do this, this, this; but now I know that in a personal atmosphere, it doesn’t work that way.
Not in the real world.
My fantasy woman would appreciate me for all the things I have done. She’d understand I might have some difficulties in life, but she would be there to support me no matter what’s going on. At the same time, she’d understand that a man is a man. You can’t change a leopard’s spots. She’d understand that I might have a fling or two.
Yeah, right. Not going to happen.
A woman will never open her arms, and say, “You know, I’m here. Come, no matter what happens.” There’s always fine print, escape clauses, disclaimers, and shit. Maybe I expect too much.
It wasn’t meant to be with Carmen, but our love was magic while it lasted, and despite all the pain, I would never take any of it back. If I had an opportunity to have a woman in my life like her again, I would. We had a special connection.
So here’s to Carmen Electra—Tara Leigh Patrick—she was a true-blue girl to me, and I have nothing but respect for her. She’ll always be in my heart. If I wasn’t married, if she wasn’t married, who knows?
We’ve now come to the end of my bad-boy-meets-bad-girl, lives-noisily-ever, up-yours, can’t-you-see-that-we’re-busy, heartbreaking Carmen Electra love story.
What went wrong? When all was said and done, she couldn’t tame the wild man—and neither could I. Our divorce became final in late 1999.
Reality Check: Like the song says, “Once you have found her, never let her go.”