Dawn Richard Says Jimmy Iovine Called Her Ugly & Preferred Light Skinned Talent + Aubrey O’Day Claims Diddy Was Sexist: He Fired Me & Accused Me Of Being Promiscuous!

Danity Kane

Dawn Richard Says Jimmy Iovine Called Her Ugly & Preferred Light Skinned Talent + Aubrey O’Day Claims Diddy Was Sexist: He Fired Me & Accused Me Of Being Promiscuous!

The previous group known as Danity Kane is now considered DK3, as it consists of DK’s core original members Dawn Richard, Aubrey O’Day, and Shannon Bex. While the women have embarked on a mini tour recently, many fans may not know the detailed dealings within the group’s dissolution. Almost a decade later Richard, O’Day, and Bex are speaking about their experiences with working with Diddy and their forthcoming musical careers. Check out a few excerpts.

Their reaction to O’Day being fired [Diddy claimed O’Day was extremely promiscuous]:

Dawn Richard:

It wasn’t about her being ‘promiscuous.’ It was about the power to prove, ‘I own your career.’ It wasn’t even about that. It gave him an excuse. It was to let you know, ‘This is my show, this is my shit, and I want to prove to you that it’s my shit and I’m going to show you how much power I have over you by saying I’m going to control your lives.’ It’s so much bigger than that even though, you’re right, it was extremely sexist.

Shannon Bex:

Whenever you had conversations with him, it was almost like you were asking, ‘Is this OK?’ And Aubrey didn’t like to bring the apprehension, so she was like, No! This is what it is. He didn’t like that.

Aubrey O’Day:

And I’m not promiscuous. I didn’t lose my virginity until my senior year of college.

O’Day feels Diddy firing her/being sexist was his reaction to him:

Being challenged.

Richard explains that they had to use O’Day to speak for the group:

Richard:

It gets even deeper that—I remember having discussions with D. and when we would talk, we would always say, it had to be Aubrey because we would say shit and the first thing that they would tell us is, if you’re a black women, we’re going to paint you as the angry black women. We were constantly fighting for each other, but we were young, we had no idea how to grab the power of our unity.

O’Day:

If something needed to change, we’d all get together first and they’d be like, ‘Aubrey, go do it.’ Because as a white women with big tits, everybody laughed it off. Whereas, I was always brushed off in regards to my talent and when it came to that, my other girls had to go out and be like, ‘She can sing this part.’ And we wanted to be here and when you want to be in the industry…

Richard:

You try to play the game.

O’Day:

And Puff plays one of the dirtiest games there is around and that’s what we were exposed to at 17 years old.

Richard recalls a memory of being mistreated by the way she looks:

You had to look a certain way. Whatever your image was, that’s what you had to be for the rest of your life. Women change daily. You’re telling us we can’t evolve? That’s what they’re told, and it’s insane because you get it from every gambit. Jimmy Iovine told Kalenna [Harper, who was a member of Dirty Money with Richard; the duo performed with Diddy as Diddy-Dirty Money] and I are to our face, he looked at Puff and said, ‘Why don’t you have two light skinned girls?’ In front of a boardroom of fifty people. He said, ‘These girls are too ugly. I don’t get it. What are you trying to do with this?’ I remember feeling exactly how Aubrey felt. You know you’re more than this and you’re sitting there and you’re being told as a grown woman you’re ugly. And the worst part was my boss then said when we left, ‘I need y’all to go put on a mini-skirt and we’re gonna straighten your hair,’ and they brought us back in the room. And he still didn’t get it. No one fought for us, ever. We’ve only had to fight for ourselves. There was no one who was willing to say, ‘We have your back.’

O’Day recalls a similar experience when she on the “Celebrity Apprentice:”

When I was doing ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ I was doing all these old fashioned looks. I have this amazing hairstylist and he would do all of these classic looks on me in the boardroom and I remember maybe the fourth or fifth episode, two producers came over to me and said, “Aubrey, you’re the youngest one we’ve had here. You’re running circles around everyone. Nobody thought you’d do this well, but Trump thinks you’re ugly.” “He’s wanting to get rid of you. He wants to keep the dumb Miss Universe around because she’s really pretty and she’s hot and he thinks that we’ll do better. She gets more ratings.” They said, “You are beautiful though and we know that but you’ve got to stop doing like…’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, these looks I’m pulling are classic.’ All these other bitches are showing up in Forever21 looking budget and I’m over here working with the best people, looking polished. They were like, “I know, but our audience is the NASCAR audience. They don’t understand your looks. We’re trying to help you. Part your hair down the middle, wear it straight, and wear a tight dress that pushes up your tits.”

O’Day talks about her relationship with her ex, “Jersey Shore” star, Pauly D:

And they make you think you’re crazy. We talked about this. My ex is way bigger than me and everybody loves him and he’s been painted as this golden boy and he’s got this great smile and he knows how to charm women. He walks into a room and motherfuckers are like, Oh my god, he’s the sweetest, kindest, that big smile, he’s so great! When behind closed doors, he’s like a completely different human being. It gets so dark that I was shocked and I’m pretty dark. The amount of abuse and things that I felt—and I also want to be fair, I really loved him and had a lot of great times. It’s very hard to say both things as if you can’t have one without the other, but you can.

If they’ve received any apologies from the men who walked over them during the inception of their careers:

O’Day:

Next question! The silence is telling you.

Richard:

And it speaks volumes because it means you never cared. You never were for us. You were never truly supportive.

O’Day:

Imagine had Diddy just encouraged us to be our greatest selves at that time. Look at after all of that, we’re back together and we just did an incredible show that featured all of us in our greatness. Imagine had he made us believe in it at that age, what we could be right now.

What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.