Brandy is opening up about her previous relationship with ex-boyfriend Wanya Morris.
The 47-year-old singer writes about their relationship in her new memoir Phases, detailing how she believes the Boyz II Men singer “took advantage” of her in an excerpt from the book shared by People.
Brandy says their relationship started when she was 16 and he was in his early 20s, and because they knew the age difference was likely to “ignite scandal,” they created an “elaborate fiction.”
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“We would pretend patience and claim we were waiting until my eighteenth birthday before pursuing any romantic connection,” she wrote.
Brandy says, “I was in over my head. Sneaking around with Wanya and lying to my parents had become a constant. They barely liked the idea of me dating at all, and telling them about us was out of question.”
The “I Wanna Be Down” singer revealed that she lost her virginity to Wanya and as their relationship progressed, he would more and more often compare her to Mariah Carey. The two had previously sung a duet together on “One Sweet Day.”
He also became increasingly hard to track down, requiring Brandy to page him before calling.
“These are the things that with hindsight you realize are wildly obvious signs of something wrong,” she said, “Neon warning signs that I chose to ignore because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, or what he was doing with me. Just that I was in love — or what I believed was love.”
They did eventually break up when Wanya admitted to cheating on her.
And while he has described their relationship as “the young ingénue having a schoolgirl crush and getting her heart broken,” Brandy says that’s not the reality.
“I believe he took advantage,” she writes, continuing, “The shame ends here. The silence ends here.”
The R&B singer explains that she has worked to come to terms with the feeling she was manipulated, saying, “I was not a fast girl with a crush. I was not a dramatic teenager who couldn’t handle rejection. I was not an unstable obsessive fan. I was a child. And he was an adult. And it’s time the world understood the difference.”
You can purchase a copy of Brandy‘s memoir for yourself on Amazon here.
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