Back in 1982 R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass crashed his Rolls Royce into a tree paralyzing the singer from the waist down. Later it was revealed that the passenger in his car that night was a transgender show girl.
Now for the first time the woman in question speaks out…
In an upcoming interview on Oprah's Where Are They Now Tenika Watson tells her side of the story.
From Huffington Post,
...they met was at a popular club in Philadelphia, where Watson was working as a nightclub entertainer and model. The two struck up a conversation and when Watson said it was time for her to go home, Pendergrass offered her a ride.
"First, the car started speeding up really fast, and I was wondering, 'Was he driving fast?' -- but he wasn't. It was out of control," Watson says. "Then I noticed he was struggling with the wheel, and all of a sudden I heard this great big bang."
The next moments were a blur. "The next thing I know, the press was there," she says. Watson was relatively unhurt -- she had contusions and a chipped tooth -- so she boarded the ambulance with Pendergrass and accompanied him to the hospital. She didn't stay, however, and only learned about Pendergrass' paralysis when it was reported in the newspapers.
Soon after the accident, Watson tried to reach out to Pendergrass, but was unsuccessful. "I went to the hospital where he was and there was a woman there. She said, 'Well, you're not going to see him before his son does,' and she caused this big scene," Watson says. "I just left."
Two days after the accident, news broke of Watson's past, including the gender confirmation surgery she'd undergone five years prior ("I don't think Teddy knew about my transition at all," she says today) and her multiple arrests for prostitution.
In light of these facts, rumors swirled that Watson and Pendergrass were intimately involved during the moment of the crash. "The hardest thing for me to read was for them to insinuate that there was a sex act going [on]," she says. "There wasn't."
