Things That Came Out About Whitney Houston After She Died

An undeniable force of talent with the charisma, skills, and sensibility to match, Whitney Houston was one of the biggest pop stars of the 1980s and 1990s. She could seemingly do it all, bringing her prodigious pipes to danceable radio hits like "How Will I Know" and ballads like "Greatest Love of All." Then Houston starred in blockbusters like "The Bodyguard," and her soundtrack cuts, such as "I Will Always Love You," became global smashes.

Houston's career and easygoing-but-stately persona, however, were carefully curated. Behind the various facades put in place by her team, record labels, and studios, Houston's life was often fraught with scandal, controversy, sadness, and struggle. When she died at the age of 48 in 2012, her death surprised and shocked Houston's fans as much as it did sadden them. In the months and years that followed, those closest to the singer and who really knew her disclosed stories and secrets that hadn't ever been known outside of an inner circle. In time, we learned a lot about Whitney Houston, but only after she died.

The following article includes allegations of addiction, child abuse, and sexual assault.

Around the same time that Whitney Houston was trying to launch her musical career in the early 1980s, she was also interested in acting. She landed an audition for an NBC sitcom called "The Cosby Show," created by the comedian and one-hit wonder who later went to prison, Bill Cosby. The TV star's comeback vehicle was about a professional couple and their five children, and Houston so impressed producers that they offered her the role of cool teenage daughter Denise Huxtable.

"The Cosby Show" was set to enter production to debut in the fall of 1984, and that's when Houston backed out. After realizing that her contract would tether her professionally to "The Cosby Show" for at least five seasons, she decided that music was the correct path, not TV comedy. "This girl we brought back from New York said to me, 'I can't sign this contract and I said 'why?' She said, 'Well I want to be a singer,'" "The Cosby Show" house director Jay Sandrich later confirmed to the Television Academy Foundation of his long-ago negotiations with Houston.

Dee Dee Warwick, sister of Dionne Warwick, provided backing vocals for Aretha Franklin and sometimes performed with the Drinkard Sisters, a gospel collective headed up by her aunt, Cissy Houston. That made Warwick Whitney Houston's older cousin by 18 years, and in 2018, 10 years after her death, an employee and relative of Houston alleged that the gospel singer had sexually assaulted the pop star in her childhood. The 2018 documentary "Whitney," produced under the supervision of Houston's family in the years after the superstar's death, divulged that information; Houston's personal assistant, Mary Jones, attested that her employer had told her. The story was corroborated for the documentary by Gary Garland-Houston, one of Houston's brothers, who reported that Warwick assaulted him in addition to his sister.

According to Jones, the abuse resulted in long-lasting psychological ramifications and identity issues for Houston. It also led her to wonder about her sexual orientation, while the memory of the assault led to a ramping up of drug misuse in what would be the final years of Houston's life.

When Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown got together in the late 1980s, and married in the 1990s, the accepted narrative of the time was that a sweet and innocent pop princess had fallen under the spell of a music industry bad boy. It was Brown, the story went, who introduced Houston to the drugs that caused her curious declines in mental and physical health. Following Houston's drug-related death in 2012, various people who knew the singer before her marriage to Brown called out the mythology for what it was. 

"Whitney took drugs and smoked weed a long time before she could even spell 'Bobby Brown,'" Rudi Dolezal, co-director of the documentary "Whitney: Can I Be Me" told Page Six. "Everybody did it. And her brothers gave it to her. It was just something you do to have fun," Houston's friend Ellin LaVar said in that documentary.

Houston's brother, Michael Houston, admitted in a 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey that he had introduced his younger sister to drugs, particularly various forms of cocaine. Michael and Whitney Houston were largely inseparable from childhood and into early adulthood, and she did everything he did, he said. "When you get into drugs, you do that together, too, and it just got out of hand," Michael Houston said. "I feel responsible for it, I let it go so far."

Whitney Houston successfully expanded her career from music to movies in 1992, landing the lead role of Rachel Marron, a stalked pop star who falls in love with her protector, in "The Bodyguard." Houston was offered the part after pre-production had started and after Kevin Costner had been cast in the titular role. However, the shooting script, credited to Oscar-nominated screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, may have pulled from Houston's real-life experiences to make for a more realistic movie about the famous-musician experience.

Houston's team asked the former North Wales and London police officer David Roberts to serve as Houston's bodyguard for a three-month European engagement in 1988, and the job wound up lasting for nearly seven years. Roberts was unfamiliar with Houston and her music when he was hired, but he quickly became enamored with the singer. "She had the voice of an angel, clearly," Roberts told the BBC in 2025. "I can't imagine a high-profile personality in so much demand being easier to look after." When looking after Houston's well-being, it was Roberts' job to check Houston in at hotels, where he used the code name "Rachel Marron." In another similarity to "The Bodyguard," Roberts had to protect his client from credible stalker threats.

Upon the beginning of her romantic relationship with fellow pop superstar Bobby Brown in 1989, Whitney Houston was part of a very visible entertainment power couple. After Houston's death in 2012, the world learned that the duo were actually two corners of a love triangle that involved another ultra-famous person. When Houston started seeing Brown, for whom she wasn't all that passionate at first, it sent a message to actor, comedian, and surprisingly successful musician Eddie Murphy that their tentative relationship was decidedly over. "She was more interested in Eddie Murphy, but he was elusive," Houston's close friend Robyn Crawford wrote in "A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston" in 2019 (via People). Murphy repeatedly tried to woo Houston and would convince her to go out on dates, but then he'd fail to show up.

In 1992, Houston and Brown decided to get married. When Murphy got word about it, he was overcome with enough regret to telephone Houston the morning of the wedding and ask her to reconsider. "Eddie Murphy called to say she was making a mistake," Crawford revealed.

While some performers seem to emerge into the public sphere as fully-formed entertainers that can dazzle audiences with their singing, acting, and dancing skills all at high levels, others are merely extremely talented at just one thing. When Whitney Houston first found fame in the early 1980s, it was strictly as a singer, although with an unparalleled generational voice that could sing soul, pop, gospel, and adult contemporary impressively. Houston's husband, Bobby Brown, similarly wasn't all that versatile at first. As a member of New Edition, he was a better dancer than he was a singer.

During their relationship, which began with dating in 1989 and ended in the dissolution of a marriage in 2007, the pair actively helped each other get better in the areas where they found themselves lacking. Houston, for example, trained Brown to be a better singer. "She taught me how to use my voice, how to blend my notes, how to chop my voice when I needed," Brown wrote in his 2016 memoir "Every Little Step" (via People). In reciprocation, Brown helped Houston loosen up. "I taught her how to dance. At first, she was uncomfortable with dancing," he said. "With the two of us working together, sharing our strengths, I think we made each other better entertainers."

Whitney Houston and Robyn Crawford met in New Jersey when they were both teenagers. They became the closest of friends and established a deep connection that lasted until the end of the 1990s. Publicly identified as Houston's best friend and personal assistant, the relationship likely turned romantic at times, according to associates consulted for the 2017 documentary "Whitney: Can I Be Me." "Robyn provided a safe place for her," Houston's friend Ellin Lavar said (via People). "They were inseparable. They had a bond and Bobby Brown could never remove Robyn," bodyguard Kevin Ammons recalled about Houston's husband. Brown's vocal resentment of Crawford led the latter to break off contact with Houston after accompanying her on a 1999 concert tour.

When the relationship was in place, Houston's father, John Houston, endeavored to end it, concerned that Crawford could tell the media about the romantic, same-sex relationship, potentially ruining the singer's career in the less-enlightened 1990s. He offered a bodyguard $6,000 to make Crawford disappear somehow, but that individual refused. In a 1992 incident investigated by the FBI, John Houston paid off a lawyer an undisclosed amount after he'd threatened to publicly expose Whitney Houston and Crawford. In 2019, Crawford published "A Song For You," a memoir that recounted her complicated and intimate relationship with the deceased star.

Whitney Houston had one child in her lifetime, daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, born in 1993 during the singer's marriage to Bobby Brown. As an older child and pre-teen, mother and daughter were often photographed together, but following Houston's death, the 2018 documentary "Whitney" revealed that the pair rarely saw one another during the first years of Bobbi Kristina Brown's life. Days after the baby was born, Houston dropped her off unannounced at the home of a family friend and came back about three months later to check in. Then she left the associate to raise Bobbi Kristina for eight years.

After Houston resumed custody of her child, the traditional roles of parent and child were sometimes reversed. When Bobbi Kristina wasn't quite yet a teenager, taking care of her mother was her responsibility when Houston was heavily misusing drugs. By the time she was a young adult, Bobbi Kristina expressed profound resentment — if not absolute hatred — of her mother. At a point when Bobbi Kristina was living with Houston, she attempted to die by suicide and was hospitalized. She also once expressed to Houston's sister-in-law, Pat Houston, that she fantasized about murdering the singer. Like her mother, she struggled with substance abuse issues, and the tragic 2015 death of Bobbi Kristina Brown came to pass in 2015.

While she hadn't scored a hit in ages and wasn't up for any prizes that weekend, Whitney Houston contributed to the festivities surrounding the 2012 Grammy Awards. She performed at a show-related event in Los Angeles on February 9, and was supposed to appear at other Grammy-adjacent gatherings, but on Saturday, February 11, Houston's bodyguard discovered the singer unresponsive in her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills. Revival efforts failed, and Houston was declared dead at about 4 p.m.

Police on the scene didn't notice any signs of malicious intent, and because a lot of things didn't make sense about Whitney Houston's death at age 48, an autopsy was performed by the Los Angeles County's coroner's office. The singer had been found in the full bathtub of her hotel room, with her face in the water. Drug paraphernalia was discovered near the body, including a spoon that bore traces of the drug. Multiple prescription bottles had been found in Houston's room, and blood and toxicology tests indicated that Houston was under the influence of 12 medications at the time of her death. The rundown also established that Houston was a frequent user of cocaine, high quantities of which were in her system at the time of death. It was determined that a combination of cocaine misuse and heart disease contributed to her death by accidental drowning.

Whitney Houston's third studio album, "I'm Your Baby Tonight," hit stores in 1990, well stocked with four Top-20 hits that included the title track and "All the Man That I Need." However, left off the LP was "Higher Love," a cover of Steve Winwood's 1986 hit, which Houston had rendered joyful and soulful. 

Album producer Narada Michael Walden finished Houston's version and had to send it in to Clive Davis, head of Houston's label Arista Records, for the sign-off, but Davis wouldn't allow the song to be used. "We didn't want her being a cover artist at the time," Davis told Rolling Stone in 2019. "Higher Love" was hidden away for years, and its only public release in Houston's lifetime was as a bonus cut on the Japan issue of "I'm Your Baby Tonight."

In 2019, Pat Houston, the executor of the estate of her late sister-in-law, arranged for "Higher Love" to finally be made available. Since Houston recorded her vocals, Arista had been absorbed into RCA Records, which brought in remixer Kygo to build a new song around the track. Credited to Kygo and Whitney Houston, the new-but-old remake of "Higher Love" used electronic instruments and horns to complement Houston's voice. A posthumous hit for Houston seven years after she died, "Higher Love" placed on the American adult contemporary, dance, and pop charts.

By 2012, Whitney Houston's once explosive career was in a slump. She hadn't enjoyed an original hit single since 1999, and hadn't starred in a feature film since "The Preacher's Wife" in 1996. "Sparkle" was supposed to restore Houston's status as a major motion picture star and public figure. A remake of a 1976 drama of the same name, and Houston's favorite movie, the musician-actor signed on to play the disapproving mother of three sisters trying to make it as pop singers. Houston, as a producer, tried for 12 years to get the new "Sparkle" in front of cameras, which was delayed after the death of planned star Aaliyah and because of Houston's substance misuse issues.

"Sparkle" eventually got made in 2011, starring Houston, Jordin Sparks of the possibly fake "American Idol," and Carmen Ejogo. Houston wouldn't live long enough to see how the public received her passion project. She died in February 2012, six months before "Sparkle" reached movie theaters.

When Whitney Houston's relatives and close friends gathered at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, near where the singer grew up and started her musical career, for a funeral in March 2012, they were surprised by the attendance of a previously unknown relative. Evidently a secret that the famous musician didn't want to get out, Nick Gordon was flanked by Houston's mother, Cissy Houston, and daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, in a pew set aside for close family. Houston's brother, Michael Houston, explained to ABC News that the 22-year-old was "like a son" to the singer, but not biologically or legally connected in any way. 

Gordon had quietly lived with Houston and her daughter since he was a child in the early 2000s, after his biological mother became unable to provide support. By many accounts, Houston came to treat Gordon as if he were her son. Brown similarly referred to Gordon on her social media accounts as her brother, before entering into a romantic relationship with him in the years after Houston's death.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, may be the victim of child abuse, or has been a victim of sexual assault, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

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• The Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

• The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).