Lionel Richie is speaking out for the first time about the scandal that ended his first marriage nearly four decades ago.
In June 1988, Richie’s first wife, Brenda Harvey-Richie, was arrested after confronting the music icon and his future second wife, Diane Alexander, at Alexander’s Beverly Hills apartment around 2:30am.
Though the confrontation was widely reported at the time, Richie never publicly addressed it.
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However, the 76-year-old singer broke his silence in his forthcoming memoir, “Truly,” as he recounted what happened that night.
“What very few people knew was that Brenda and I were separated,” Richie wrote.
He continued, “I got a place at the beach, and I was hiding out there, trying to be alone, trying to decompress somehow, because it was killing everyone. It’s early in the morning when I drive into town, and I happen to stop to see Diane, who has an apartment in a house there. Shortly after I arrive, there is a knock at the door.”
“This is not a security-buzz-you-in place, not a gated residence, just an apartment that opens to the street,” Richie added. “When the door opens, Brenda is standing there. There is a massive confrontation. Diane is in total shock and I’m trying to leave, to draw Brenda away. It’s the most awful screaming match of my life, and it’s all in this small entryway.”
The four-time Grammy Award winner recalled that at the time, he was thinking of how he could defuse the situation.
“The question is — How to stop it? How do you physically move a tragedy that is exploding in front of you?” Richie wrote. “I believed that if I left, Brenda would leave. She did get in her car, at first. But once I was gone, she went back and resumed the argument. The neighbors called the police. Charges were brought and then dropped.”
“The story became the scandal of my century,” he recalled. “It took on a life of its own. Thankfully, there was no social media.”
According to contemporaneous reports by UPI and the Los Angeles Times, Brenda, then 35, was arrested and booked on suspicion of corporal injury to a spouse, resisting arrest, trespassing, vandalism, battery, and disturbing the peace.
Los Angeles police said neighbors reported screaming inside Alexander’s apartment. Officers found Brenda “striking and kicking the victim on the floor,” according to UPI.
Furniture inside the apartment was broken and scattered, a police report stated.
Richie, who was identified as a “second victim,” later told officers that Brenda had kicked him in the stomach before he left the scene.
Brenda was released that day on $5,000 bail.
In “Truly,” Richie recalled how he coped with the questions from friends and family as well as the media scrutiny in the aftermath of the incident.
“Normally, I’d use my Southern upbringing to underplay the drama,” the Tuskegee, Alabama, native wrote. “Understatement is the watchword in the South.”
“There’s always a way to spin everything,” Richie said. “Not this time. The most painful part, the tragedy of our lives, was that Brenda was heartbroken. And I get it. Ladies and gentlemen, I get it. You never know what you are going to do or feel until you’re in the moment and it’s in your face. None of us had been in this situation.”
“This wasn’t Alabama; this was a brand-spanking new miniseries right here,” he added. “And nobody was prepared. We all deserved a pass because we didn’t know what the story was going to be. It was just raw and ugly and disastrous.”
The singer recalled that the incident marked a turning point in his marriage with Brenda.
“Prior to that morning, I recall there was a cloud of uncertainty as to whether I wanted to try to reconcile and not be separated. From then on, though, the way back was harder to find,” he wrote.
“That’s the saddest day in the life of a marriage,” he continued. “When you know you may love each other, still, and you have a history that you will always have, but it’s over. And you know it.”
Richie and Brenda met in the early 1970s when they were both students at Tuskegee University and began dating during the singer’s rise to fame as a member of the funk and soul group The Commodores.
The pair married in October 1975 and became the legal guardians of Nicole Richie, the daughter of their musician friends Pete Escovedo and Karen Moss, in 1983. The former couple formally adopted Nicole in 1990 when she was nine years old.
During a 2022 interview with People magazine, the “American Idol” judge described Nicole as a “godsend.”
“She was a little girl who needed a shot,” he said of Nicole. “She was used to people coming and going. She looked at me and I’d say, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’”
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In his memoir, Richie recalled that he first met Alexander during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, where he performed at the closing ceremony. She later appeared as a dancer in the music video for his 1986 hit “Dancing on the Ceiling.” Richie wrote that the two grew close during his 1986–87 Outrageous World Tour.
Lionel recalled that he and Brenda had been experiencing marital troubles for years due to the pressures of his fame. The two finalized their divorce in 1993 but continued to co-parent Nicole.
Richie and Alexander married in 1995. They welcomed son Miles in 1994 and daughter Sofia in 1998.
“Family was my anchor,” Richie wrote. “With my children, my heart was across the room looking out. There’s Nikki, then Miles, and then here comes baby Sofia, a tiny angel and I’m having the greatest time in the world.”
However, Richie recalled the marriage faltered due to his constant travel and Alexander’s dislike of the music business.
“To her credit, she was the one who left me—which I found out about on a flight back from London after one of the guys in the band handed me a British newspaper that reported how we were headed for divorce,” Richie wrote.
“If it had been up to me, I would have forged on—with our wonderful kids and everything—and just tried to make everyone happy, even if, in my heart of hearts, I was married to being in the music business.”
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“She probably did us a favor by calling the situation for what it was, though it was no less tragic,” he continued. “And it was a painfully slow drip—death by a thousand cuts—for the next four years until the end.”
After almost a decade of marriage, Richie and Alexander filed for divorce in 2004, citing “irreconcilable differences.”
Since 2014, Richie has been in a relationship with Lisa Parigi, who is 40 years his junior. During his 2022 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Lionel referred to Parigi as “my heart.”
In a 2019 interview with People magazine, Richie reflected on finding love again with Parigi.
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“She’s extremely beautiful, but most importantly, she’s smart and helps me deal with my crazy world,” Richie said of his girlfriend.
“At this time in my life when you can be so jaded about things, Lisa kind of makes everything feel a bit safe,” he added.
While speaking with the outlet, Richie described himself as a “hopeless romantic” and shared the lessons that he had learned about love.
“I’m a man who’s been through the ups and the downs, the ins and the outs of love,” Richie said.
“Love is not an exact science, it’s something you have to go through,” he noted. “People don’t walk in love, people fall, which means you’re out of control, there’s no logic.”
“How you survive is your story.”
