Brandy reflects on Whitney Houston's death

When Grammy-winning singer and actress Whitney Houston passed in 2012, it shocked Hollywood and all of her fans around the world. Singer and actress Brandy, who starred with Whitney in 1997’s Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, felt the loss deeply, as Whitney passed on her 33rd birthday.

Now she’s writing about how she needed time to deal with her friend and mentor’s passing in the foreword to a new book, Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston, by journalist Gerrick Kennedy.

“It’s natural for people to want to place blame. I placed a lot of blame on a lot of people too, when it came to Whitney,” Brandy writes, according to Page Six. “We loved her so much and needed something or someone to attach blame to because it was so hard to accept that she was gone.

“We don’t really have the right to speak on anything that she had to go through in her life,” she continues.”No one knows what she was running from. No one knows what she was trying to overcome. No one knows the costs that came with being Whitney Houston. That level of fame, that level of expectation, that level of pressure.”

Brandy also writes about the first time she met Whitney, a full two years before they started together in Cinderella. Remarking on that moment during the 1995 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, she writes, “When she embraced me, she embraced me as if she knew me. And she did know me, because of my music… Whitney gave me her jacket to wear, and I hung out with her for the whole day. It was a dream, one of the best days of my life.”

Their turn together in 1997's Cinderella made history, as Brandy became the first Black actress to play the role, something that Brandy writes came as a secondary thought to working with the Bodyguard star.

“First of all, I didn’t realize that I was making history with the role. For me it was, ‘Oh my God, I’m working with Whitney Houston,'” she writes, later reflecting that she was “so happy to be in the same studio” as the Waiting To Exhale actor.

When it comes to blame, Brandy may not be pointing any direct fingers but Bobby Brown, Whitney’s ex-husband, hasn’t minced words in the past. During a Red Table Talk interview in April of 2021, he placed the blame for both Whitney’s death, and the untimely passing of Bobby and Whitney’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina, on his daughter’s partner Nick Gordon. Noting that both mother and daughter passed in the same manner (face down in the tub, drowning, with cocaine found in their bloodstream), the “My Perogative” singer said, “He was the only one there for both situations with my ex-wife and my daughter, and they both died the exact same way.”

Gordon was found legally responsible for Bobbi Kristina’s death in 2016, and later died in 2020 from a heroin overdose.

As for Brandy, she prefers in her forward to talk about Whitney’s legacy and the way she made everyone who heard her angelic voice feel.

“Whitney could take you to so many places with just her voice,” Brandy writes. “She has inspired generations of little girls all over the world to sing from their heart and guts. That was her magic, and that’s her legacy. And we’ll never see another Whitney Houston.”

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