All About Laughs
The private life of Whitney Houston has been under severe microscopic lenses after her passing in February of 2012. Since her death, we’ve seen the Lifetime depiction of her biopic as well as a few documentaries. Most recently, Lifetime has pushed out another documentary centered around the lives of the late icon as well as her daughter, Bobbi Kristina, who also passed away in 2015, called Whitney Houston & Bobbi Kristina: Didn’t We Almost Have It All.
While fans await the upcoming major motion picture biopic, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, starring Naomi Ackie, these other depictions and documentaries remain viewable. Whitney, a 2018 documentary co-produced by sister-in-law Pat Houston, received massive attention thanks to claims it included that the others did not. One, in particular, involved her cousin Dee Dee Warwick, famous singer Dionne Warwick’s sister.
Within the documentary, Houston’s longtime assistant Mary Jones made claims that the singer told that she had been [touched] by Dee Dee. Also in the film are similar claims made by Whitney’s brother and husband to Pat, Gary Houston. These claims have been vehemently denied by both Warwick and her mother Cissy Houston.
In an interview with People, Warwick states that she is definitely still angry about the claims made in the documentary. “All I can say about Dee Dee is that she was a loving, caring, giving person,” said the legendary singer. “What was depicted of her is absolutely untrue and something I will never forgive.” Dee Dee Warwick passed away at age 66 in 2008.
Warwick further expressed her disapproval in another interview with Larry King Now, calling Jones’s claims “evil”. “I have tried to refrain from responding to that,” she said. “First of all, it’s totally hogwash. My sister would never, ever have done anything to do any harm to any child, especially within our family. And for those lies to be perpetuated in this so-called documentary film, I think it’s evil.”
Cissy Houston as well issued a statement upon the film’s release in an attempt to debunk the claims presented in the documentary. “We cannot reconcile the Public’s need to know about Whitney’s life as justification for invasion of her privacy or the charge against Dee Dee, a charge which neither Whitney nor Dee Dee is here to deny, refute or affirm, the statement read. “Neither I, Dionne, nor my son Michael who was very close to his sister, and in the film is VERY candid about their drug use, has ever heard these allegations; we have never heard anything remotely connected to the crimes charged against Dee Dee in the film.”
Also to refute the claims was Whitney’s very close friend, Robyn Crawford. According to Crawford’s book, A Song For You: My Life With Whitney Houston, she wrote: “Whitney loved Dee Dee. She was very close to the Warwick family. Both before all of her success — and during.”
She added, “She and I talked a lot about our families. She shared everything with me about her family, as I did mine. If that was true, I would have known about it. She would have told me.”
