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Dr. Dre’s Assault Scene Scrapped From ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Movie

Shortly after its opening on Friday, the biopic Straight Outta Compton, hit number 1 at the box office. It earned $56.1 million dollars over the past weekend. Critics who saw the N.W.A biopic had goo...
Dr. Dre’s Assault Scene Scrapped From ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Movie
Written by Val Powell
  • Shortly after its opening on Friday, the biopic Straight Outta Compton, hit number 1 at the box office. It earned $56.1 million dollars over the past weekend.

    Critics who saw the N.W.A biopic had good reviews for the film but there was one important part that was apparently cut from the story — Dr. Dre’s assault on a female journalist.

    The biopic omitted the part where Dr. Dre physically attacked Denise “Dee” Barnes, in January 27 of 1991. The script did initially include the part about the “assault” but the director, F. Gary Gray, cut the part and chose to focus on N.W.A instead.

    Barnes, a hip hop journalist, was attacked after she did an interview with Ice Cube, who had a dispute with N.W.A after parting with them. Dr. Dre beat the female journalist at a nightclub.

    Los Angeles Times learned that the original script by Jonathan Herman, described Dre as “glazed, drunk, with an edge of nastiness and contempt.” He saw Barnes and confronted her about the interview with former member, Ice Cube.

    “The conversation between the rapper and the hip-hop journalist escalates to the point where Barnes throws her drink in Dre’s face, at which point he attacks her by “flinging her around like a rag-doll, while she screams, cries, begs for him to stop,” the script, containing the omitted scene, read.

    An essay from Barnes was published in Gawker earlier this week. Barnes commented on the obvious omission of her encounter with Dr. Dre. She admits she does not want to see “a depiction of me getting beat up” but she wished that the film acknowledged that it happened. She went on to call the biopic a “revisionist history.”

    Dr. Dre owned up to his “horrible mistakes” said Rollingstone. Learning from the past, he said he will never repeat the same mistake again.

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