Soon after those menacing encounters, I walked into work one morning to find my staff members tamping down panic. A couple of servers, which back then were as big as end tables and twice as heavy, had been stolen, and the scuttlebutt was that the theft was an inside job. That someone on Vibe’s publishing side had let in movers from Bad Boy. It was almost time to send pages to the printer, and the whole issue was saved on those servers. All the editorial changes. All the pages, with the advertising adjacencies that had been paid for by clients. Gone. (In response to fact-checking inquiries, Combs, via representatives, would not comment on the record for this piece.)
I’ve always remembered the threatening call. I mentioned it in my memoir, “Shine Bright,” though I got wrong the reason for his vexation. But I repressed the rest. The only reason I know the details is a chance meeting I had at the MacDowell artists’ residency this May. Ava Chin, who is now an author and a professor of creative nonfiction, was also there. I hadn’t seen her in decades. Ava asked me early in the residency if I was ever going to write about Vibe. I said, “Yes,” and she said, “Good.” Then, just before I left, I mentioned that I was writing about Combs and told her that he said he would see me dead in the trunk of a car. In the previous months, accusations of his serial abuse of women, which had been rumored for years, had surfaced, and I was thinking about my professional relationship with him. I asked her if she remembered the tense situation. Over her turkey club, Ava said, “I absolutely remember.” She wasn’t privy to the phone conversation, but she knew other details. She told me my own story. I don’t remember being shuttled from office to office. “Shuttled” is Ava’s word.
The entire memory had been removed from my mind, like the servers that were stolen from the offices. I wanted someone else to validate the story, so from the rear garden of MacDowell’s main building, I FaceTimed Jesse Washington, who is now a journalist and filmmaker. When he confirmed Ava’s recounting, I stared at the long green meadow, processing. The fact that two people had to tell me a story about myself was mortifying. It made me question my own truths. I was flooded with questions about my own experiences of vulnerability, victimhood, ambition, fear and regret, and what all of it means with regard to my professional and personal legacies. Considering this nauseating image of myself running and hiding from Combs, of people at work protecting me, made me confront other things I’d possibly repressed about that feral and fantastic time in my life. To be a powerful woman in the music industry, and in the hip-hop media specifically, exacted a toll I’ve resisted reckoning with. It’s so much easier, frankly, to tell other people’s stories. As a journalist, I have learned how to get people to recall stuff they would rather forget or keep to themselves. It’s an art tart with betrayal. But it’s mine. And so Here we are, I was thinking in that garden. Now I have to remember.
I don’t recollect exactly how Combs and I left things after he threatened me in ’97, but it’s not as though we could stop dealing with each other. Hip-hop, inching its way toward world domination, needed us to keep contributing in our respective ways — on my end, documenting its trajectory, and on his, branching out into television, liquor and more. We interacted when necessary. Sometimes an exchange was just us smiling for cameras.
Two photos of us stand out to me and mark places where our journeys intersected. There’s one from the 1990s in which my hair is its natural dark brown, and I have on a navy-and-turquoise zip hoodie. I’m awkward in his embrace, still getting used to being in the limelight. The other is from October 2006. I’m 41, with my new grays cinnamon-coated by the celebrity colorist Rita Hazan. My teeth have been Invisaligned, and my gaze is sure. We’re posing before a party celebrating both the release of his album “Press Play” and the new issue of Vibe magazine. Combs is the cover star. I wrote the celebratory article.
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