Rihanna tells Oprah in their interview airing Sunday that she was “worried and concerned” about Chris Brown after he assaulted her. Fighting tears, Rihanna said that as hurt and angry as she was, she felt Brown needed help. “And who’s going to help him,” she said, “Everybody’s going to say he’s a monster, without looking at the source.”
“I lost my best friend. Everything I knew switched … switched in a night and I couldn’t control that,” the Barbados native told Winfrey. “So I had to deal with that, and that’s not easy for me to understand or interpret. It’s not easy to interpret on camera. Not with the world watching.”
Also in the interview, which airs Sunday, the singer talks freely about her career, her family, the recent death of her grandmother and the price of fame. Winfrey also went to the singer’s old neighborhood in Barbados to gain a better understanding of Rihanna’s past.
“I went there with my own ideas about who she was, watching the videos and listening to her music,” Winfrey said in the episode’s trailer bout the interview. “I thought she was going to be kind of a badass, kind of a hard edged rocker, pop woman. Nothing could have been further from the truth .”
For the full interview, tune in to “Oprah’s Next Chapter,” Sunday at 9 p.m. on OWN.
