The deleted Straight Outta Compton scene of Dr. Dre beating TV host Dee Barnes has been found.
In a new L.A. Times story, Gerrick Kennedy reports that the missing scene was included in screenwriter Jonathan Herman’s initial draft.
In the scene, the fictional Dre, “eyes glazed, drunk, with an edge of nastiness, contempt” (per noted from the script) spots Barnes at the party and approaches her.
“Saw that [expletive] 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 [expletive]. 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.”
The scene is similar to what Barnes wrote about the incident earlier this week in a report for Gawker. “The truth is too ugly for a general audience,” Barnes wrote on Gawker. “I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up…but what should have been addressed is that it occurred. When I was sitting there in the theater, and the movie’s timeline skipped by my attack without a glance, I was like, ‘Uhhh, what happened?’ Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A, I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history.”
It was so caustic that when Dre was trying to choke me on the floor of the women’s room in Po Na Na Souk, a thought flashed through my head: “Oh my god. He’s trying to kill me.” He had me trapped in that bathroom; he held the door closed with his leg. It was surreal. “Is this happening?” I thought.
Dr. Dre’s history of abuse has been unraveling in front of our eyes ever since Straight Outta Compton hit theaters. For hip-hop fans, it was an old story that he fought Barnes, rapper Tairrie B and singer Michel’le, but in the feature film, many of those scenes and incidents were cut from the movie.
The rapper admitted to the assault in a 1991 interview with Rolling Stone. “People talk all this shit, but you know, somebody fucks with me, I’m gonna fuck with them. I just did it, you know,” Dre said at the time. “Ain’t nothing you can do now by talking about it. Besides, it ain’t no big thing – I just threw her through a door.” Eazy E added, “Yeah, bitch had it coming.”
“I made some fucking horrible mistakes in my life,” Dre told Rolling Stone in his cover story. “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.”
Ice Cube recently commented on the controversy. “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,” Gray said of the missing assault scene during a pre-release screening Q&A, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Ultimately, Dr. Dre had several opportunities to confront his history of beating up women. But, the rapper has been quiet since the reports surfaced. At least we know that the
