What One Woman’s Shattered Career Reveals About the Music Industry
Updated at 7:18 p.m. ET on June 1, 2020.
“I know it’s easy to wonder what any woman in her right mind would be doing with hip-hop,” the scholar and music journalist Joan Morgan wrote in a 1995 issue of Vibe magazine. “But there was sweetness in the beginning … Perhaps it was because we were being acknowledged as part of a whole.”
Morgan, who later coined the term , is among the many black women who appear in the new HBO Max documentary, . The film focuses chiefly on Drew Dixon, a former music executive who worked with the Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons in the ’90s and him of rape in December 2017. (Simmons, who has now of sexual misconduct by at least 16 women, has denied all , responding to the accounts shared by Dixon and three other women, two of whom also accused him of rape.) , for which Simmons declined to be interviewed, recounts the experiences that Dixon and other women—, , and —say they had with the rap mogul.
