By the time the first lady of Ruthless Records was in second grade, she realized her family was poor. But as a woman she struggled for more than a decade to stop blaming herself for the physical abuse she said she experienced in her relationship with Dr. Dre.
Singer Michel’le Toussaint (her first name is pronounced MEESH-uh-lay) was instrumental in Dre’s early success as a producer. She’s also the mother of his son, Marcel Young, who was born in 1991. She is absolutely part of the story of Ruthless and N.W.A. But she wasn’t part of “Straight Outta Compton,” the biopic that purports to tell the group’s story.
When she spoke to The Post Wednesday morning, Toussaint said she still hadn’t seen the film but that she’d read thefirst-person piece journalist Dee Barnes wrote for Gawker, which enumerated all the ways the film and its director F. Gary Gray erased the women, including Toussaint, who laid the foundation for the success of Ruthless and N.W.A. Barnes wrote that she was a “casualty of ‘Straight Outta Compton’s’ revisionist history.” Barnes sued Dre, now 50, after he assaulted her in a Los Angeles nightclub in 1991. Barnes wrote that, at the time, she thought Dre was going to kill her. He pleaded no contest to the charge, and they settled a civil suit outside of court.
[For more of this story, written by Soraya Nadia McDonald, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...nd-ruthless-records/]
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