Chris Brown’s behavior is once again being questioned in a new documentary.
Research discoveries Chris Brown: A History of Violence investigates allegations against the “Run It!” singer of Rihanna, Karrueche Tran and others. Several women come forward in the document to detail the allegations against the R&B singer, including one Jane Doe who claims Brown drugged and raped her on Sean “Diddy” Combs’ yacht in 2020.
Brown’s attorneys deny Doe’s claim, calling all of 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 – touted as the next Michael Jackson – and how it collapsed after he physically assaulted Rihanna in 2009 attacked.
TMZ has obtained leaked mugshots of Rihanna’s serious injuries. In a police report, she said Brown struck her repeatedly with his fist, choked her until she was nearly unconscious and threatened to “kill” her. He pleaded guilty to 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 then broke up (twice). Domestic violence experts in the document explained how when people grow up and witness abuse, as Brown and Rihanna both said they did, it becomes more difficult to end patterns of abuse.
The documentary details how Brown’s abuse would continue. Tran, his girlfriend 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 Drake and Frank Ocean. His former manager, Michael Guirguis, better known as Mike G, sued him for assault, false imprisonment and battery. Brown was found guilty of breaking a man’s nose without provocation. In the summer, he was indicted for allegedly brutally beating several men during one of his concerts in Texas, with the help of his entourage.
There have been several allegations of sexual abuse.
Freddy Sayegh, a criminal and entertainment lawyer, said in the document: “I have reviewed most of his criminal history and he has a fifteen-year history of being involved in reported violence of some kind almost every year of his life .”
The documentary explores how, despite this long list of serious claims, Brown — who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, court records show — has maintained his superstar status. A year after Rihanna’s attack, BET tapped Brown for a major Michael Jackson tribute. When he kicked off his ’11:11 Tour’ in June this year, he joked to the sold-out crowd about attempts to ‘blackball’ him. Brown remains popular with fans and is the second most followed male artist on Instagram.
Woman who accused Brown of raping her on Combs’ yacht appears in document
The documentary features a Jane Doe who claims 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 spoke out to “shed light on what really happened.”
Doe said she was an aspiring dancer who had just moved to Los Angeles. During a trip to Miami, a friend invited her to Combs’ home on Star Island. That day, she met Combs — who is currently in jail ahead of his sex trafficking trial — and Brown.
Doe said Brown was initially nice and friendly. She hoped that connecting with him would boost her ambitious dance career.
“We talked and he gave me a drink,” she said. “This is when my memory starts to get a little funny” because her body suddenly became heavy and she started to feel tired.
Doe said Brown offered to give her a cruise on a yacht, but she claimed he led her into a bedroom and raped her while she said “no.” She claimed he then texted her to tell her to take Plan B, the morning-after pill.
Doe said she continued to talk to Brown after the alleged incident, but working through it through therapy made her realize it was a sexual assault. She sued Brown for $20 million in 2022, but the text messages and voice messages she sent Brown after the alleged rape surfaced, leading her lawyers to believe she didn’t come forward with all the information. They dropped her as a customer. Shortly afterwards, a judge dismissed the case on grounds of ‘lack of prosecution’.
One of Doe’s attorneys, Ariel Mitchell-Kidd, appeared in the document. Mitchell-Kidd has since said she is representing her again, telling People, “I believe what happened to her is 100% true. I feel like I failed her as an attorney because I couldn’t make her comfortable enough with me in such a short time where she felt 100% comfortable coming to me.
In the documentary, Brown’s lawyers said Doe’s claims were fabricated. A representative for Brown did not respond to Yahoo’s request for comment.
An attorney for Combs declined to comment.
A woman named Liziane Gutierrez also appears in the documentary and claims Brown gave her a black eye in 2016. She claimed she was invited to his Las Vegas hotel room for a party, where cocaine, pills and marijuana were present, and she took a photo that reportedly angered Brown. She sued Brown for assault and they settled the case.
The doc also revisits how Brown was detained in Paris in 2019 for an alleged aggravated rape and drug offence. The investigation 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 in Brown’s home, but not by Brown. The accuser alleged that her phone was confiscated, 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 R. Kelly to Fall’
The document uses domestic violence experts and statistics to examine Brown’s long list of problems. It also points out that there were whispers and accusations about Combs and R. Kelly for years before they faced serious criminal charges.
“Look how long it took for R. Kelly to fall,” Mitchell-Kidd said in the doctor’s office. “It wasn’t good enough that we had a video of him” with a 14-year-old minor during his child pornography trial in 2008. “That wasn’t going to work. 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 sex abuse in a second federal trial.)
Sunny Hostin, who hosted ID’s aftershow after the Brown documentary, talked about how she is surprised that people have seemingly forgotten what Brown did to Rihanna.
“The attack on Rihanna was over 15 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday because I remember being in the courtroom,” he said. The view co-host, who is also a lawyer. “But recently a friend took her son and a group of other kids to a Chris Brown concert, and when they came back, I was kind of shocked and said to her and to the teens: Do you know that he really, really hurt Rihanna? They had no idea.”
Chris Brown: A History of Violence premieres Sunday, October 27 at 9pm ET on ID.
