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Dr. Dre’s assault on female journalist Dee Barnes was reportedly included in an early Straight Outta Compton screenplay draft.
Information on Dr. Dre’s history of abuse against women has re-emerged after the release of the N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton and his accompanying comeback album, Compton.
Dee Barnes recently wrote an essay for Gawker, speaking in detail about the 1991 incident where Dre assaulted her, a moment in N.W.A history that doesn’t appear at all in the film.
However, the Los Angeles Times reports that an earlier screenplay of Straight Outta Compton by Jonathan Herman did include a scene that featured the brutal encounter.
According to the Times, Dre’s character appears in the scene "eyes glazed, drunk, with an edge of nastiness, contempt". Here’s how the scene was supposedly going to play out:
“Saw that shit you did with Cube. Really had you under his spell, huh? Ate up everything he said. Let him diss us. Sell us out.”
“I just let him tell his story,” Barnes’ character retorts, “That’s what I do. It’s my job.”
“I thought we were cool, you and me,” Dre fires back. “But you don’t give a fuck. You just wanna laugh at N.W.A, make us all look like fools.”
The conversation escalates, Barnes throws her drink in Dre’s face before he attacks her “flinging her around like a rag-doll, while she screams, cries, begs for him to stop.
It’s one of a number of scenes cut from the final film. Director F. Gary Gray explained in a recent Q&A that ““There are so many things that you can add or subtract. Cube always said, ‘You can make five different N.W.A movies.’ We made the one we wanted to make.”
Other scenes excluded were Dre being shot four times in the leg, an intense flashback of his younger brother being killed and his house catching fire.
Dee Barnes said she didn't think it should've been presented in the film, explaining that "the truth is too ugly for a general audience." However, she felt that it should've certainly been addressed. "Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A., I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history."
Controversy has been following Dr. Dre in many different forms, with a number of listeners taking offence to lyrics concerning rape on Compton's Eminem assisted track 'Medicine Man'.
Dr. Dre recently spoke on his history of violence with Rolling Stone.
"I made some fucking horrible mistakes in my life," he said. "I was young, fucking stupid. I would say all the allegations aren't true—some of them are. Those are some of the things that I would like to take back. It was really fucked up. But I paid for those mistakes, and there's no way in hell that I will ever make another mistake like that again."
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