‘BONNIE AND CLYDE’: Foxy Brown rose to fame with Jay-Z. “We discovered each other,” she says. (Kevin Mazur)
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“That’s not me,” protests Inga Marchand, a k a Foxy Brown, when asked whether she’s a diva.
It’s 7 p.m. and she’s three hours late to a photo shoot, accompanied by an entourage of six. They got pulled over for speeding and sweet-talked their way out of a ticket, explains her assistant. Then they ran into Jay-Z and chilled for a while, says Brown’s fiancée.
And now Foxy is feeling edgy because she hasn’t eaten all day. She asks for a cheese panini, grilled salmon and a side of fresh fruit. Brown forgets about the fruit when she notices a pair of purple Louboutins she chooses to wear for the shoot.
“The Foxy character and Inga Marchand are two different people,” she continues. “My fiancé calls me Inga. No one around me calls me Foxy. I go to church every Sunday. I go to Bible study every Friday night. I’m saved.”
It wasn’t always that way.
Though her platinum-selling first album, “Ill Na Na,” made her one of Brooklyn’s most famous daughters, Foxy has lately been in the news mostly for her run-ins with the law, tangling with manicurists and posing for photo shoots in prison garb. Just this week, she appeared in Brooklyn Supreme Court to face charges of violating a restraining order and allegedly baring her bum at her neighbor.
But when the judge threw the case out, Foxy faced — for the first time in many years — a clean slate, a chance to put her legal woes behind her and trade Page Six for the music pages. Foxy Brown is ready for a comeback.
What she isn’t doing is forgiving and forgetting.
“The mooning thing bothered me more than anything else in the past — because I’m a lady,” says Brown, 31.
Brown showed up in court last week with her attorneys, Salvatore Strazzullo and Ikesha Al Shabazz, ready to plead not guilty to flashing her underwear and bum last July. The defense was prepared to discredit the story by proving Brown was going commando in a tight dress that night — but the neighbor refused to testify, and the charges were thrown out.
The ordeal mortifies Brown nonetheless. “I’m cut from a different cloth,” she says. “I would never moon someone. I was raised in a good family.”
Brown was raised by her mother, a teacher, in Park Slope. As a teen, she was determined to live a life larger than the ones she saw unfolding around her.
“All my friends were in the park smoking weed and getting pregnant,” she says. “I didn’t want to be the young black girl having a baby, a baby’s father, being on welfare. That wasn’t going to be my story. I wanted to be a criminal-justice attorney.”
Instead, she discovered her talent for rapping.
When she was 15, her cousin, a DJ, introduced her to a still-undiscovered Jay-Z, and she rapped on his debut album, “Reasonable Doubt.”
“Jay and I are each other’s history,” she says. “We discovered each other, basically. Our first record together was what blew both of us up. We became Bonnie and Clyde.”
With her provocative curves — she’s a size 4 with a 34DD bust — and even more provocative lyrics, Foxy recorded a string of hits. She took her stage name from Pam Grier’s famous blaxploitation character and more than lived up to the cinematic Foxy’s bluster.
It was Jay-Z who introduced Brown to her best friend and kindred spirit, Naomi Campbell.
“It was 2005 and Jay said to me, ‘You and Naomi are the most misunderstood female celebrities ever. You have to meet,’ ” she recalls. “He set up a meeting in office at Def Jam. We came in, and we’ve been like sisters ever since.”
But while Jay-Z’s career has transformed him into a mogul, Brown has not released a full album in a decade.
“Of course I want to release another album,” she says. “It’s not that I’ve been twiddling my thumbs. I’ve had major setbacks.”
In 1997, Brown was accused of spitting on hotel workers who failed to locate an iron she requested. She was arrested for missing her court appearance. Two years later, she was carted away by police after yelling obscenities while performing in Trinidad. In 2000, she crashed her Land Rover while driving without a license in Brooklyn. On a trip to Jamaica in 2002, she allegedly punched a policewoman she thought was trying to detain her.
What finally landed her behind bars was her alleged 2004 assault of two Chelsea manicurists, who claim she attacked them over a $20 tab she refused to pay.
In her eyes, her biggest crime is being famous while black. “The prosecutors just wanted my head,” she says.
“If Lindsay Lohan was black, she would have done two years, at least. Is there no equal standard?”
Even in a Rikers jumpsuit, she was every inch the diva. “You’d have thought Obama was in the building when I walked in: The girls loved me,” she says. “The officers were jealous because I was getting hundreds of thousands of letters a week.” She even shot a photo spread for a hip-hop mag while in jail.
Incarceration was easy, she says, compared to the card she already had been dealt — losing her hearing.
It was a Wednesday evening in 2005, and Brown had just wrapped a photo shoot with Jay-Z and LeBron James. She went to bed feeling normal and woke up to a world of complete silence.
The condition was diagnosed as sensorineural hearing loss, a rare viral infection that Brown made worse by ignoring the problem for months, just praying it would go away. Refusing to wear a hearing aid, she would have friends tap a beat on her shoulder while she tried to record for her label. Brown said she considered the ailment a punishment from God.
Brown underwent ear surgery in 2006 that partially restored her hearing. Today she wears a hearing aid she hides under her long hair extensions. “I lost one of my senses, and that’s the hardest thing I went through,” she says. “It’s a miracle I got it back. I can hear running water again. I can hear my mother say, ‘I love you.’ I’m on an assignment from God.”
She said she plans to become a spokeswoman for the National Deaf Association. She’s also penning a memoir about fame, titled “A Gift and a Curse.”
“I live a different life,” she says. “I’m not at every party; I’m not seen everywhere. That’s why people still care about my brand. I’ve never whored myself out.”
She says she’s still debating whether to accept Hugh Hefner’s $2 million offer to pose on the cover of Playboy.
Brown says she plans to release a long-delayed album in 2011. She is also suing New York City for $100,000 for civil-rights violations, false arrest and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
If she’s no longer the star she was in the ’90s, Brown said she’s proud of where she is today.
“I’ve never stabbed, hurt, killed, stolen, anything,” she says. “But I went to jail for a year. What is that? My pastor said to me the fact that I’m not living under a bridge as a crazy woman, talking to myself, is amazing.”