Blackmail and scandal: The FBI’s chilling file on Whitney Houston
Few pop stars were as commercially successful as Whitney Houston.
From her late 1980s explosion with ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)’, through mammoth movie work and her My Love Is Your Love comeback a decade later, Houston stood as one of the absolute heavyweight unit shifters of all music, standing as number 12 of the most lucrative artists ever with over 220million claimed record sales, and 1992’s The Bodyguard soundtrack third in the biggest albums rankings.
For a solid ten years, Houston reigned supreme in the upper echelons of female solo stars along with Mariah Carey and Madonna. Yet, a tumultuous marriage to former New Edition singer Bobby Brown and a perennial drug problem hung over her career towards the end.
On February 11th, 2012, Houston was found submerged in the bathtub at Los Angeles’ Beverly Hilton, with paramedics entering Suite 434 at approximately 3:30pm to attempt resuscitation, only for Houston to be pronounced dead at 3:55pm. She was 48 years old. When the county coroner made their official assessment, the drowning was put down to the “effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use”.
The stress and drama lurking behind the scenes had come to light the following year, when the FBI released some 128 pages of their file on Houston, revealing apparent blackmail plots and unwanted correspondence from obsessed fans.
Dating from 1988 to 1999, during the peaks of her pop reign, the heavily redacted documents revealed some nasty threats from seemingly unsavoury legal people. One such extortion case came from an unknown Chicago lawyer. In 1993, the lawyer wrote to Houston’s BrownHouse Productions company stating that if she didn’t pay $100,000 to their client, they would “reveal certain details of [Houston’s] private life … to several publications,” later dialling up the payment to an eye-watering $250,000.
Ruthless stuff. FBI agents did meet with Houston and her father, John, but suggested they actually knew the nameless lawyer, “a friend… [who] would never do anything to embarrass her,” left the FBI with little recourse other than to close the case. It turns out that John allegedly did send the blackmailer a confidentiality agreement and a lump sum.
Then there were the unhinged fans. A dark and unsettling price that often comes with stardom, the documents revealed one letter writer from Vermont claiming, “I start to shake… when I think about you.”
“Over the past 17 months, I have sent … 66 letters to Miss Whitney,” the message eerily continues. “I have tried to stop writing the letters and to give up twice, but after a few weeks I had to start writing again… I have gotten mad at [Whitney] a few times [for not replying]… it scares me that I might come up with some crazy or stupid or really dumb idea… I might hurt someone with some crazy idea.”
Efforts were made by the FBI to ascertain the threat posed by the sinister fan, deeming him “harmless”, as well as another writer from Europe who claimed to have written some of Houston’s biggest hits. While possibly not escalating to serious danger, such queasy letters, coupled with possible blackmailing efforts, all paint a toxic terrain Houston was wandering while the lurid tabloid press obsessed over every wounded misstep with grubby relish.
