Video Vixen

By Michael Letterlough Jr.

One of hip-hop’s most heavily kept secrets is no longer under tight lock and key. Hip-hop’s seedy and troublesome underworld of drugs, promiscuous sex and manipulation, has been, until now, successfully buried under the superficial facade of glamorous video girls, luxuriously expensive cars and a seemingly endless flow of money. With rap’s dirty laundry hanging out on the line, America’s talking about our famous music moguls because one woman refused to continue living in their world.

The controversial new book, “Confessions of a Video Vixen,” was written by model, actress and retired video vixen herself, Karrine Steffans. In the book she exposes her most intimate relationships and sometimes outrageous, if not raunchy, sexual experiences with some of hip-hop and Hollywood’s most well respected elite-including such big names as Jay Z, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Ja Rule, Usher, Ice T and Vin Diesel.

While the book, which is currently number seven on New York Time’s Best Seller’s list, is primarily being focused on for Steffans tell-all confessions about her sexual trysts with some of rap’s biggest A-list players, it also tracks the footsteps of a life that has been ravaged with abuse, rape, betrayal and endless no- way-out situations.

“I just wanted to tell because what I’m finding is girls, women especially, when they hear other women’s stories they find a piece of it that relates to them,” said Steffans in a delicately gentle voice. “That’s why there’s so many different things in this book. It’s not cover-to-cover celebrity. It’s rape issues, physical abuse issues, mother-daughter, father-daughter issues, and all other issues-self esteem, self worth and self empowerment.”

Steffans father, who she grew up without for the majority of her life, was from New York and her mother was from the Caribbean. Growing up on the small island of St. Thomas, Steffans painfully summoned up in her book the childhood memories of poverty, rejection and a physically abusive mother who maintained frequent liaisons with various married and unmarried men. This developed in her at an innocently early age a misguided impression of relationships with the opposite sex.

Feelings of worthlessness, hate and despise she received from a jealous and abusive mother subsequently led to the spiral of cataclysmic events that troubled her life. From bad decisions as a young girl to ultimately becoming a victim of those decisions as a young woman.

“What’s happening is girls see themselves in me,” said Steffans. “A lot of us are alike and are afraid to admit that, and so what’s happening is they’re learning that no matter what has happened to you, no matter what you’ve done to yourself, no matter what’s been done to you, it’s never too late or too early to change your life, make it better and share your experience with other people and help the ones next to you that aren’t doing so good.”

With being raped at a very young age while her best friend amusingly watched from the other side of the room, stripping to make it on her own, surviving an abusive and controlling relationship with old school rapper Kool G Rap, who’s also the father of her son Naiim; coupled with drug binges, homelessness and countless sexual encounters with men, the question one must wonder is how mentally and emotionally stable is Steffans today?

“It’s funny because everybody wants me to go to therapy,” she said laughing. “I’ll say this. I think with God, all things are possible and I could have Dr. Phil himself sitting in my living room and he wouldn’t be able to help me, other than open to me what God’s already been doing for me. So I don’t believe that’s the answer.

“I don’t think that [therapy’s] wrong,” she added. “I think that it’s a good idea, but that’s only part of the answer. So the book was definitely therapy. My support that I have in my friends is therapy. The virtuality I’m learning every day, as I’m getting closer to that side of myself, is definite therapy.

“I just think that God is the ultimate professional,” she preached. “I am blessed beyond my wildest dreams and that allowed me to know that I’m doing what I’m suppose to be doing, and I’m doing a good job.”

Now that Steffans has managed to crawl her way out of hip-hop’s deceptively alluring lifestyle, she wants her book to reach, whom she said she believes are in the thousands, women who attain to create the same lifestyle for themselves that she did.

“The girls that are in videos really aren’t the problem to me,” Steffans said. “That’s just maybe five percent. It’s all the girls that wanna be [in videos], and that will follow the NBA All Star games, and that will go to every club and whatever show is in town.”

As she speaks her tone rises feverishly with emotion, conveying her agitation and sincere concern for the girls she sees heading down a similar path of destruction.

“They’ll be the girls backstage,” she continued. “It’ll be 15 degrees outside, but they have no clothes on! They’re at the hotel at 4 o’ clock in the morning coming in. I mean, you see them all the time and none of them are video girls. They’re somebody’s daughter,” she protested, “who thinks that’s where they need to be and they’re taking their power and their worth from someone else who seems to have more than they, who actually has a lot less than they do.”

Even though she’s no longer in the dark, disillusioned by fancy clothes, big mansions islands getaways, life for her has a made a drastic turn-around, while the people from her past, as she said, are destined to remain right where they are…in her past.

“Those relationships, they’re all wrong. They’re still wrong, they were wrong to begin with,” she adamantly explained. “I don’t think that, although my mother gave birth to me, I don’t think she’s my mother. I think that gift has been given to somebody else who is like my serogant mom.” That gift of motherhood has been given to a woman, who Steffans shared, has been in her life for the past five-years and has allowed her to be where she is today.

And what about Kool G Rap? She continued, “As far as my son’s father is concerned, we never had a good relationship, so I don’t expect that to get better all of a sudden.

Sounding a little tired of the subject of Rap, she expressed that he is not a good person and said that it’s impossible to have a good relationship with someone who isn’t good at heart.

“Its not mean,” she said, “but everyone who has a child with him has the same experience, so I know it’s not just me.”

Although the relationship with her mother, her sisters (born to different fathers by her mother), and Rap aren’t expected to make amends anytime soon, Steffans said she is comfortable with that in her life.

“All those relationships are just the way that they are and I got to the point where, it was okay,” she said. “You know, the door’s not closed, but I’m not tryin to pull anybody in it either.”

As far as forgiving the ones that have hurt her most, she feels there’s no reason to forgive people whose life and actions she cannot control.

“To me there’s nothing to forgive. To me, that’s just the way life is and no one’s done anything so awful that hasn’t been done before,” said Steffans. “I don’t feel wrong, I feel like okay, you were wrong and so, it was a big cycle. I understand it. So when you understand people and how life works, I think it’s impossible for you to feel hatred or malice towards anyone.

“I understand why my mother is and was the way she always has been, I totally understand,” she said with assurance. “She doesn’t understand it, but I get it. So there’s nothing to forgive, it’s just the way life is. We all have different things and some of us make it, some of us don’t and it’s okay…to me, it’s just okay.”
Although not everyone thinks that Steffans book is okay. Many have argued that her book may very well be enticing young girls to try and achieve her once fairytale horror, rather than deter them away from it. Then there are the celebrities names she’s made mention of in the book, many of which have families of their own. But she strongly affirms that her life, as portrayed in her book, is nothing to aspire to and is purely a cautionary tale to young girls.

“I was homeless, I was in bankruptcy, I had a drug enduced seizure and almost died and everybody left me. So you know, people read what they want,” she said. As she continued to talk she was looking over her emails, which she said was well over 400 on her website, and said they were all people who loved the book.

“People are getting it! They’re understanding it,” she said with enthusiastic excitement. And even her A-list of hip-hop lovers whose names she revealed in the book, with the exception of one, she said have given her no flack at all.

“I’m getting flack from people that have never met me,” she laughed, “that just don’t know, and the book isn’t for them anyway.”

So far, while the general consensus seems to be cool with the truth Steffans dished about each of her sexual relationships, Bobby Brown, she explained, said in a statement that it was all a lie.

“Yeah, and then he said leave [me] alone, cause I have pictures of us together,” she said cheekly. “He figured out and spoke a little too soon on that one. His exact quote was, ‘It’s a fabrication, I should sue her.’ And then he says (after the pictures surfaced), ‘Oh, maybe I should just leave her alone’ cause he thought about it,” she said.

While many across the country don’t agree with the book and believe that airing out her dirty laundry only makes Steffans even more of an un-classy figure, still representative of everything video girls embody, she doesn’t seem bothered by it at all.

“I think that’s the ideal that everyone’s going through, like, ‘Oh, this is awful!’ But I can’t do anything about it, because it all actually happened and it’s all the truth.”