“The truth is too ugly for a general audience”.

While N.W.A.’s biopic Straight Outta Compton enjoys critical and commercial success there has been some unease over the fact that Dee Barnes is not depicted in the film. Barnes was a rapper and TV show host, but is known to many for Dr. Dre’s brutal assault on her at a party in Hollywood in 1991.

Dre addressed the attacks in an interview with Rolling Stone this week, saying he “made some fucking horrible mistakes,” and now Barnes has written an editorial about the new film and its “revisionist history”.

Barnes writes: “[The assault] isn’t depicted in Straight Outta Compton, but I don’t think it should have been, either. The truth is too ugly for a general audience. I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up, just like I didn’t want to see a depiction of Dre beating up Michel’le, his one-time girlfriend who recently summed up their relationship this way: ‘I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and told to sit down and shut up.’

“But what should have been addressed is that it occurred. When I was sitting there in the theater, and the movie’s timeline skipped by my attack without a glance, I was like, “Uhhh, what happened?” Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A., I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history.”

Read the full article on Gawker.