On the eve of the premiere of the Whitney Houston movie “The Bodyguard” movie in 1992, a Chicago lawyer tried to extort $250,000 from her, according to a heavily redacted FBI file.
The extortion attempt, revealed in “Whitney & Bobbi Kristina: The Deadly Price of Fame” (Gallery Books) by Ian Halperin, came at a time when Houston was besieged by rumors about a lesbian affair with her personal assistant and longtime friend, Robyn Crawford.
The lawyer told an FBI agent that the info included “knowledge of intimate details regarding Whitney Houston’s romantic relationships and will go public with the information.”
According to the report, Houston’s father, John Houston, “settled the matter by sending a confidentiality agreement almost immediately,” although it was “unclear how much money was paid to silence the person and whether he met the initial demand for $250,000.”
That same year, Whitney married singer Bobby Brown. On the day of the wedding, Halperin notes, the bride gave Crawford a black Porsche “as a token of their friendship.”
Halperin quotes Kevin Ammons, a former Whitney bodyguard, saying that John Houston was extremely unhappy with Crawford and worried that she would go public with the relationship.
According to Ammons, the elder Houston told him, “We’ve got to do something about that motherf–king b—h. She’s ruining my family and driving everybody nuts. She’s lost her grip on reality. I’ll pay you $6,000 if you put the fear of God in her.”
Ammons told Halperin he refused the request and that John Houston then “warned the bodyguards to ‘keep an eye’ on Robyn.”
This past January, Whitney’s daughter, Elsewhere in the book, Halperin offers a theory on what happened to Bobbi Kristina, was found unconscious floating in a tub of cold water — an eerie echo of Whitney Houston, who was found dead in a bathtub with cocaine in her system in 2012.
Bobbi Kristina remains in a coma, and her grandmother, Cissy Houston, said in April that her granddaughter had suffered “irreversible brain damage.”
Though drug use has not been confirmed, Halperin quotes sources saying a suicide attempt was unlikely because of the temperature of the water.
“She probably took the plunge,” one local drug addict tells him. “He told me that when somebody ‘drops’ — which seems to be a term for an OD — there are all kinds of ways to revive them. ‘I’ve never seen it done in a bath,’ he said to me, ‘but I sort of helped bring somebody around with a cold shower. You stick them under the cold water and you slap them to bring them around.’ ”
Halperin notes that, if applied to Brown, this could explain the “facial bruises that paramedics reportedly found.” But Halperin also notes that immersing an overdose victim in ice cold water is dangerous, as it could “put them into shock, or they could drown.”
At this point, though, with Brown in a coma, it’s sadly likely that no progress will be made on her case until she either recovers or passes away.
“Only the toxicology report — or in the worst-case scenario, an autopsy — can definitively answer the question about which, if any, drugs Bobbi Kristina had in her body at the time she was found,” Halperin writes. “It’s possible that authorities will unveil new evidence that discredits the cold-water bath theory completely. It’s also possible that we may never know what happened.”