Chris Brown’s behavior is once again being called into question in a new documentary.
Investigation Discovery’s Chris Brown: A History of Violence explores allegations made against the “Run It!” singer by Rihanna, Karrueche Tran and others. Multiple women come forward in the doc to detail allegations against the R&B singer, including one Jane Doe who claims Brown drugged and raped her on Sean “Diddy” Combs’s yacht in 2020.
Brown’s attorneys deny Doe’s claim and call all the allegations in the documentary “malicious and false.”
What is Chris Brown: A History of Violence about?
Timed with the network’s “No Excuse for Abuse” campaign for Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the documentary looks at Brown’s rise in the music world — being touted as the next Michael Jackson — and how it came crashing down after he physically assaulted Rihanna in 2009.
TMZ obtained leaked police photos of Rihanna’s graphic injuries. In a police report, she said Brown repeatedly punched her with his fist, choked her until she was nearly unconscious and threatened to “kill” her. He pleaded guilty to felony assault and was given five years probation and community service.
Brown and Rihanna later reunited — brought back together by Combs, who invited them both to his Miami home to work things out — and split (twice) after that. Domestic violence experts in the doc explained how when people grow up witnessing abuse, as Brown and Rihanna both said they did, it makes it harder to end patterns of abuse.
The documentary details how Brown’s abuse allegedly continued. Tran, his girlfriend off and on from 2010 to 2015, was granted a five-year restraining order against him. The model claimed he punched her in the stomach twice, pushed her down a flight of stairs, threatened to kill her and threatened her friends.
Brown also smashed his mother’s car windows with a rock while in rehab for anger management, and broke a window on the set of Good Morning America. He fought with Drake and Frank Ocean. His former manager, Michael Guirguis, known as Mike G, sued him for assault, false imprisonment and battery. Brown was found guilty of breaking a man’s nose without provocation. Over the summer, he was sued for allegedly brutally beating several men, with the help of his entourage, at one of his concerts in Texas.
There have been multiple sexual assault allegations.
Freddy Sayegh, a criminal defense and entertainment attorney, said in the doc, “I looked at most of his criminal history, and he’s got a 15-year history of nearly every year of his life being involved in reported violence of some sort.”
The doc explores how, despite this long list of serious claims, Brown — who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, court records showed — has maintained his superstar status. One year after Rihanna’s assault, BET tapped Brown for a big Michael Jackson tribute. As he kicked off his “11:11 Tour” in June of this year, he joked to the sold-out crowd about attempts to have him “blackballed.” Brown remains popular with fans and is the second-most followed male artist on Instagram.
Woman who accused Brown of raping her on Combs’s yacht appears in doc
A Jane Doe appears in the documentary to claim Brown drugged and raped her in 2020.
She said she received “death threats” after suing Brown in 2022 — the case was dismissed “without prejudice” — but she was speaking out to “shed light on what really happened.”
Doe said she was an aspiring dancer who just moved to Los Angeles. On a trip to Miami, a friend invited her to Combs’s home on Star Island. That day, she met Combs — who is currently incarcerated ahead of his sex trafficking trial — and Brown.
Doe said Brown was nice and friendly initially. She hoped connecting with him would boost her aspiring dance career.
“We had talked, and he had handed me a drink,” she said. “This is when my memory starts getting a little bit weird” because her body suddenly became heavy and she started to feel tired.
Doe said Brown offered to give her a yacht tour, but she claimed he led her to a bedroom and raped her as she said “no.” She claimed he texted her after to tell her to take Plan B, the morning-after pill.
Doe said she continued to speak to Brown after the alleged incident, but processing it through therapy led her to realize it was a sexual assault. She sued Brown for $20 million in 2022, but texts and voice texts she sent Brown after the alleged rape surfaced, leading her attorneys to think she wasn’t forthcoming with all the information. They dropped her as a client. Shortly after, a judge dismissed the case, citing “lack of prosecution.”
One of Doe’s attorneys, Ariel Mitchell-Kidd, appeared in the doc. Mitchell-Kidd has since said she’s representing her again, telling People, “I believe what happened to her is 100% true. I feel that I failed her as an attorney because I couldn’t make her comfortable enough with me in such a short period of time where she felt 100% comfortable being forthcoming with me.”
In the documentary, Brown’s attorneys said Doe’s claims were fabricated. A rep for Brown has not responded to Yahoo’s request for comment.
An attorney for Combs declined to comment.
A woman named Liziane Gutierrez also appears in the documentary and alleges that Brown gave her a black eye in 2016. She claimed she was invited to his hotel room in Las Vegas for a party, where cocaine, pills and marijuana were present, and she took a photo that allegedly angered Brown. She sued Brown for assault and they settled the case.
The doc also revisits Brown being detained in Paris in 2019 on an alleged aggravated rape and drug infraction. The probe was later dropped, and Brown — who maintained his innocence — sued the woman for defamation.
There was also a 2017 allegation in which a woman claimed she was sexually assaulted at Brown’s home, though not by Brown. The accuser claimed her phone was taken, she was given drugs and barricaded in a room where she was sexually assaulted. She sued Brown for creating an unsafe environment. The case was settled out of court.
‘Look how long it took for R. Kelly to fall’
The doc uses domestic violence experts and statistics to examine Brown’s lengthy list of troubles. It also points to how there were whispers and allegations about Combs and R. Kelly for years before they faced serious criminal allegations.
“Look how long it took for R. Kelly to fall,” Mitchell-Kidd said in the doc. “It wasn’t good enough that we had video of him” with a 14-year-old minor at his 2008 child pornography trial. “That wasn’t going to do it. It took things like a docuseries, [Surviving R. Kelly]. It took the power of the media,” she said. (Kelly was found guilty of eight counts of sex trafficking in 2022. Months later, he was convicted of child sexual abuse in a second federal trial.)
Sunny Hostin, who hosted ID’s aftershow following the Brown documentary, talked about how she’s surprised people have seemingly forgotten what Brown did to Rihanna.
“The assault on Rihanna was over 15 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday because I remember being in the courtroom,” said The View co-host, who is also an attorney. “But I just recently had a friend take her son and a group of other children to a Chris Brown concert, and when they came back, I was sort of shocked, and I said to her and to the teenagers: Do you know that he really, really hurt Rihanna? They had no idea.”
Chris Brown: A History of Violence premieres Sunday, Oct. 27 at 9 p.m. ET on ID.
