Dr. Dre’s Assault on Dee Barnes Was Included in Straight Outta Compton Screenplay Draft

Dr. Dre's Assault on Dee Barnes Was Included in Straight Outta Compton Screenplay Draft

Photo via Dee Barnes’ Facebook page

With the N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton out and Dr. Dre having just released his new album ComptonDre’s history of abuse against women has come back into the spotlight. Recently, Dee Barnes wrote an essay for Gawker discussing the 1991 incident where Dre assaulted her—a moment in N.W.A history that didn’t make it into the film’s final cut.

According to the Los Angeles Times, however, an earlier screenplay of Straight Outta Compton by Jonathan Herman included a scene featuring the altercation.

Fictional Dre appears in the scene “eyes glazed, drunk, with an edge of nastiness, contempt”. According to the Times, here’s how the scene plays out:

“Saw that shit you did with Cube. Really had you under his spell, huh? Ate up everything he said. Let him diss us. Sell us out.”

“I just let him tell his story,” Barnes’ character retorts, “That’s what I do. It’s my job.”

“I thought we were cool, you and me,” Dre fires back. “But you don’t give a fuck. You just wanna laugh at N.W.A, make us all look like fools.”

The conversation escalates, Barnes throws her drink in Dre’s face before he attacks her “flinging her around like a rag-doll, while she screams, cries, begs for him to stop.”

It’s one of several scenes that were cut from the film. Director F. Gary Gray explained in a Q&A for the film, “There are so many things that you can add or subtract. Cube always said, ‘You can make five different N.W.A movies.’ We made the one we wanted to make.”

Other scenes excluded were Dre being shot four times in the leg, his house catching fire, and an intense flashback of his younger brother being killed.

Barnes said she didn’t think it should’ve been depicted in the film, saying “the truth is too ugly for a general audience.” However, she felt that it should’ve been addressed. “Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A.,” she wrote, “I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history.”

Recently, Dr. Dre discussed his history of violence with Rolling Stone. “I made some fucking horrible mistakes in my life,” he said. “I was young, fucking stupid. I would say all the allegations aren’t true—some of them are. Those are some of the things that I would like to take back. It was really fucked up. But I paid for those mistakes, and there’s no way in hell that I will ever make another mistake like that again.”

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