assault

Dr. Dre’s Assault of Dee Barnes Was Originally in Straight Outta Compton

This isn’t looking good. Photo: Jaime Trueblood/Universal Pictures

In F. Gary Gray’s defense of not including Dr. Dre’s assault on Dee Barnes (or any other mention of his violence against women) in Straight Outta Compton, the director noted that the film’s original script ran more than 150 pages long. Following Barnes’s personal essay on her exclusion from the film, which implied that Gray intentionally omitted the assault because he was involved, the L.A. Times has obtained a copy of Jonathan Herman’s original script that the paper says did include the assault:

In the scene, the fictional Dre, “eyes glazed, drunk, with an edge of nastiness, contempt” (per noted from the script) spots Barnes at the party and approaches her.

“Saw that [expletive] you did with Cube. Really had you under his spell, huh? Ate up everything he said. Let him diss us. Sell us out.”

“I just let him tell his story,” Barnes’ character retorts, “That’s what I do. It’s my job.”

“I thought we were cool, you and me,” Dre fires back. “But you don’t give a [expletive]. You just wanna laugh at N.W.A, make us all look like fools.”

The conversation escalates, Barnes throws her drink in Dre’s face before he attacks her “flinging her around like a rag-doll, while she screams, cries, begs for him to stop.”

It should be noted that Barnes’s account of the assault does not mention her throwing a drink at Dr. Dre prior to the beating. The Times says her assault was one of many parts of Dre’s life that ultimately got cut in the final script, including Dre being shot, his house catching on fire during a party, a jail scene, and a “graphic flashback” of his younger brother’s death. Dr. Dre and Gray have yet to comment on Barnes’s essay.

Dee Barnes’s Assault Was Originally in Compton