When actor and singer Brandy Norwood was 16 years old, she was the star of the prime-time sitcom “Moesha,” a coming-of-age series in which the teenager in Los Angeles’ Leimart Park neighborhood navigates typical teenage crises, including being pressured to have sex by her crushes and eventually figuring out how to get a prescription for the birth control pill. According to “Phases,” a memoir the 47-year-old Norwood released this week, even as her character Moesha was secretly dating the boys her dad, Frank, forbid her to see, Brandy was keeping the truth from her real-life parents that she was in a sexual relationship with Boyz II Men’s Wanya Morris, who was then 22 years old.
Morris has not responded to multiple news outlets asking him to confirm or deny Brandy’s claims, but he has always denied that he slept with her before she was 18 years old. During a 2020 Instagram Live video, he said he and Norwood were “hanging around each other so much that there became to be some sort of connection, an intimate connection,” but there was no sex until Brandy was “of age.”
“You can ask Brandy, she will tell you the same story,” Morris said then. But that’s not what Brandy’s saying now.
“You can ask Brandy, she will tell you the same story,” Morris said then. But that’s not what Brandy is saying now.
In her book, she writes that Morris “took advantage” of her.
“I was in over my head,” she writes in “Phases.” “Sneaking around with Wanya and lying to my parents had become a constant. They barely liked the idea of me dating at all and telling them about us was out of the question.”
If the two vocalists were sleeping with each other when Brandy said they were, then her parents’ anger would not have been her only concern. Brandy’s profile was rising. There was her music career and “Moesha” to think about. Less than two years after her show debuted, she played Cinderella to Whitney Houston’s Fairy Godmother in “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella” on ABC.
“Wanya and I understood, with diamond-cut clarity, that public knowledge of our relationship would ignite scandal, potentially threatening everything we’d both worked for, so he and I opted for elaborate fiction,” Brandy writes. “We would pretend patience and claim we were waiting until my eighteenth birthday before pursuing any romantic connection.”
We have seen variations of Brandy’s story before, particularly in the music industry. Long before he was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for racketeering and violating the Mann Act, a 27-year-old R. Kelly secretly married 15-year-old Aaliyah. A 24-year-old Elvis Presley began dating Priscilla Beaulieu when she was 14 years old.
As far as Brandy’s story goes, it remains unsettling that so many girls — Black and otherwise, famous and unknown — report experiences of older men they trusted preying on their vulnerabilities instead of protecting them. Because we are more culturally aware than we have ever been about power dynamics in age-gap relationships, the hope is there will be fewer girls of all races and ethnicities who are subjected to these relationships and the coercion and manipulation that so often accompanies them.
As played by Brandy, Moesha was one of the most three-dimensional characters on television: She sometimes made poor decisions, but she got to be morally complicated and live in the grays in a way Brandy, the teenager portraying her, could not. As Brandy details in “Phases,” there were so many expectations placed on her as a Black girl in the public eye to be as close to morally pure as possible.
Her reputation would have been ruined, and his likely would have been unscathed.
In an interview with NPR, Brandy said fame, including being Disney’s first Black princess, cost her “my childhood, my privacy, my identity.” If there had been any evidence then that she was in a sexual relationship with an adult male celebrity, then she almost certainly would have been seen as the “fast and grown” girl who had chased him and not a teenager that, as she now says, was taken advantage of. Her reputation would have been ruined, and his likely would have been unscathed.
Unfortunately, the idea of the “fast” girl who seduces adult men still persists, even if not to the same extent. In her book, Brandy holds compassion for her 16-year-old self. “The shame ends here,” she concludes powerfully in the book’s chapter about her relationship with Morris. “The silence ends here. I was not a fast girl with a crush. I was not a dramatic teenager who couldn’t handle rejection. I was not an unstable obsessive fan. I was a child. And he was an adult. And it’s time the world understood the difference.”
