All About Laughs
Diddy and MTV are prepping for a new installment of Making the Band. The hit reality show from the 00’s was a staple on the music video channel and produced a handful of hit groups from O-Town, Da Band, Day 26 and most famously Danity Kane.
The girl group scored 2 #1 albums (Danity Kane & Welcome to the Dollhouse) and a top 10 single (“Damaged”) before infighting and bad management lead the girls to not one, but two break-ups, and the eventual loss of 2 members.
The groups biggest deterrent however, their label boss Diddy. The hip-hop mogul was very vocal when it came to his opinions on the girls appearance and talent while they auditioned for the band and well after their inception. Pre-Me Too he got away with a lot of comments that could now be deemed colorist, sizeist, sexist and misogynistic.
Aubrey O’Day was arguably the break out star of the group, starring in two seasons of the talent search show before eventually getting drafted into Danity Kane. She’s gone on to establish herself and a strong reality TV entity, appearing in her own TV shows as well as installments of Donald Trump’s Apprentice, Ex’s on the Beach, Famously Single and Marriage Bootcamp.
Talking about her time on the series during an interview with Variety, O’Day revealed she’s still scarred from ‘Making the Band’ and still recovering from trauma that followed her on the show. The singer also states she received comments from Diddy that she believes he would “not at all” get away with these days. “Diddy’s a father, so hopefully he’s learned things about the way that you handle women and has more compassion for women now,” she says.
Despite being a standout and one of his favorites before joining the band, post band O’Day and Diddy had a rocky relationship. He often disagreed with her clothing choices, ever changing physical appearance and over opinionated matter. Their beef culminated in Diddy ejecting her and bandmate Wanita D. Woods from the group in 2008.
“Puff is a very difficult person to work with,” O’Day says. “Everything had to be perfect. I remember times where he looked at my toenails and was like, ‘What is your third toenail doing? Go get that sh– fixed before you walk into a room.’ Or we would be in rehearsals performing an hour-and-a-half set over and over and he would walk in for five minutes with a camera and say, ‘Aubrey, why are you sweating? You look like a wet dog. You’re the hot one, so do you think anyone wants to see that?”
Dawn Richard also spoke out on her time with Diddy. The singer was also in a band with her boss called Diddy-Dirty Money. According to an insider, the singer stated, “He would bring us in the room and say, ‘You’re ugly. You gotta fix your face.’ Wild stuff. But he was preparing us for what the industry would be. But if we would have done what we did in this time, Puff would have been crucified. Because you can’t talk to women now — what he was saying, it was aggressive. It was really aggressive. It was crazy.”