Former En Vogue member Dawn Robinson has been living in her car in southern California for three years, the singer and reality TV star revealed in a video posted to her YouTube channel this week.
Robinson, 59, was a founding member of the R&B/pop group that ruled the radio and MTV in the early 1990s with hits “Hold On,” “Free Your Mind,” and several other chart-topping hits. She departed the group for a second time in 2010 and joined the cast of R&B Divas: Los Angeles for its first season. In 2019, she reunited with En Vogue for at the City of Hope Gala.
On Tuesday, Robinson revealed some of the details from her life since then in a video posted to her official YouTube channel, titled “YOUR NEW LIFE IS IN THE SCARY” on Tuesday.
“If you had said to me while I was in En Vogue, ‘You’ll be living in your car, one day,’ I’d be like: ‘Huh, no, I’m always gonna have an apartment. I can’t live in my car. How can I do that?’ she told viewers from inside the vehicle. “We say that we can’t do certain things before we even know we’re capable.”
Robinson explained how in 2020, she was living with her parents in Las Vegas, which the singer described as “wonderful, until it wasn’t.” A falling out with her mother, who she says took “a lot of her anger out on me,” led her to move out and into her car, where she began to sleep for a month while still in Las Vegas.
Soon, Robinson said, her then-co-manager told Robinson that she could stay with him in Los Angeles. But when she arrived, she says, there was not enough room in the apartment for her and her dog. The co-manager, who Robinson does not name in the video, put her up in a hotel for a night — but that one night became eight months of living out of a hotel room for the Grammy-nominated singer. During that period, any apartment she would view would be rejected by the co-manager, she told her viewers. After those eight months, she was fed up, believing that the co-manager was trying to exert control over her.
“I told my assistant one day I have been researching car life, this whole community of people that live in their cars…in their RVs, and a whole community of people that live in vans… And I loved what I was seeing. I just thought, wow, these people, I can do that,” she said.
Robinson then describes the day she drove out to Malibu, in what would be her home since 2022. The sun was setting, and “Sailing” by Avant was playing on the radio, she recalls, adding that she “didn’t regret anything.” But her first night living in her car was no cakewalk.
“I was just scared that night; that first night was scary,” Robinson said. “But then as I got to know what to do in my car and how to do it, like how to cover my windows. And you don’t talk to certain people. You’re careful of telling people that you’re alone, as a woman, especially, and that I’m a celebrity. I don’t just divulge that to people. If you don’t know who I am, I’m not telling you that part.”
Robinson emphasizes in the video that she is not looking for sympathy and that her announcement about where she’s been living is no publicity stunt. She is, however, filming her experiences with the hope of making a documentary out of the experience. But the once high-flying member of a world-famous girl group is also honest about where her life is at the moment.
“You may have heard of something called Dark Night of the Soul. That’s when you go through a period of isolation, a period of separating yourself from family and friends. And I’m definitely in the trenches of this right now,” she said. “I wouldn’t trade my experiences and what I’ve gone through for the world. I miss my family, I miss everybody that I was connected to. But I needed to do this alone and without everybody’s judgment or opinions and all of that stuff. I needed to do this for me.”
Robinson closes out the video with an encouragement to viewers to be spontaneous and challenges everyone watching to “do something scary.”
“People are gonna call you crazy, and that’s okay,” she said. “Maybe you are. I’m crazy and I’m also proud of myself. I know that none of these people who are calling me crazy could do what I’ve done.”
Source: Hollywoodreporter
