“He had no soul in his eyes, just blank”

Pop star Rihanna has broken her silence about being assaulted by singer and actor Chris Brown. In an interview with Diane Sawyer that aired on Good Morning America today, the singer provided a harrowing account of events leading up to Brown’s arrest. The evening started out well, she said. The couple had attended a pre-Grammy party where they “had a blast.” Brown became violent on the way home, after she confronted him about him having received a text message from another woman. “He wouldn’t tell the truth and I wouldn’t drop it,” she said. “The truth is right here in text messages, so it escalated into him being violent towards me and … it was ugly.” Brown shoved her into the car window, punched her several times in the face, bit her and threatened to beat her up when they got home. When she tried to call his assistant for help, he told her she had made a huge mistake, threatened to kill her and threw her phone out of the window. She recalled “there was no person” when she looked at Brown during the attack: “He had no soul in his eyes, just blank.” She still doesn’t know what made Brown’s anger escalate to that point, she told Sawyer. “There’s nothing you can do or say to make somebody do that to you,” she said. “That’s on them. I just knew he had a problem. He had a temper. He needed to get some help. And he did.” The singer also shared a lesson she learned after the brutal attack: “The thing men don’t realize when they hit a woman, it’s the face, the broken arm, the black eye, it’s going to heal. That’s not the problem. It’s the scar inside.”

MTV