The new Whitney Houston documentary screened at Cannes Film Festival last night and shockingly revealed Whitney had been sexually molested by her cousin, the late soul singer Dee Dee Warwick...
Documentary filmmaker Kevin McDonald explains how he made the bombshell discovery with Indie Wire
When did you first come across reports that Houston had been sexually abused?
It was quite late in the game. I had a sense that there was something like that behind it. I’d watched her a lot. There was something about her discomfort in her own skin, something about the way she presents or hides herself, her lack of overt sexuality. She’s this beautiful woman but she’s very closed in her demeanor. I’d been watching her for several months and saying to the editors, “There’s something about her that reminds me of something.”
I’d been working on a film I never finished about child sexual abuse and it just rang a bell with me. Then I started to ask questions. That led somebody to tell me, Whitney told me she was abused, but they wouldn’t go on camera. Then Gary the brother told me he was abused by Dee Dee [Warwick]. So it’s not allegations. He’s saying I was abused by this person and told me, ‘I think she abused Whitney.’ Pat Houston, who’s here, told me that, yeah, Whitney had told her this but not given any details.
For about two months, that was all I had. Then Mary Jones, who was her assistant for a long time and was with her every day for the last 10 years of her life, decided she wanted to talk about it.
She decided this was the elephant in the room that nobody wanted to talk about, this was the thing that to her — she had a sister who had been abused in her childhood, and she felt so strongly that this was the thing that was the catalyst of so many things in Whitney’s life. She wanted to talk about it. That was the last interview I did two weeks before I finished the edit, and I had to rejiggle the whole film. The reason it was so late in the film was because it was an investigation. I wanted to represent that this was something that came very late and revised the whole way I felt about the story and the way to represent that in the film was three quarters of the way through to have people see the earlier parts of the film in a new way.Go here for the full interview.
Dee Dee Warwick is singer Dionne Warwick's sister.
