Dawn Robinson, a founding member of the R&B girl-group En Vogue, just revealed that she’s homeless and has been living in her car for the past three years.
The 58-year-old singer told fans how she has fallen on hard times in a heartbreaking video posted to YouTube on Tuesday.
It comes just weeks after her former band announced that they would be embarking on a lucrative European tour, even gushing about bringing back a different member to the group, calling her their ‘sister.’
But Dawn, who first quit the band in 1997, has a much less glamorous reality which she explained to fans.
‘If you guys were with me, what in 2020, I did like 105K interviews and in the interim I was living with my parents in [Las] Vegas and that was wonderful until it wasn’t. I love my mom [Barbara Alexander] but she became very angry and [she was taking] a lot of her anger out on me.
‘I was her target all the time and I was like, “I can’t deal with this.” Like, I respect her too much. I didn’t understand it I still don’t, It hurt me.’
The eight-time Grammy nominee’s manager offered her to stay at his $1,700/month apartment in Los Angeles, but there was ‘not enough room’ for her since they both owned dogs (her 16-year-old dog Max has since passed away).
‘So it turned into, “Okay, I’m going to put you in a hotel for the night.” And that one night turned into eight months [at $3K/month]. Oh my God, you guys I was like, “No, this is unacceptable,”‘ Dawn scoffed.
By 2022, Robinson researched ‘car life’ culture and decided to give it a shot: ‘I felt free. I felt like I was on a camping trip. It just felt like it was the right thing to do.’
‘But then as I got to know what to do in my car and how to do it, like, how to cover my windows and you don’t talk to certain people,’ Dawn noted.
‘You’re careful of telling people that you’re alone, as a woman especially, and I’m a celebrity [so] I don’t just divulge that to people.’
