Bobbi Kristina Brown would regularly FaceTime her best friend, Alex Reid, after fights with boyfriend Nick Gordon and show off new bruises and describe the abuse she’d suffered, Reid said in an eye-opening interview with E! News on Thursday evening.
“Pretty soon after we met she started telling me about the times he had been physically abusive and it just kept escalating. It just kept getting worse and worse,” Reid said. “She would FaceTime me whenever she was distraught. When something had just happened or show me a bruise.”
Last Wednesday, the same day the comatose Bobbi Kristina was moved into hospice care, her conservator—acting on behalf of Bobbi Kristina and her family—filed a $10 million lawsuit against Gordon that contained similarly shocking allegations.
In the suit, Bobbi Kristina’s conservator claims that Gordon made himself out to be her “surrogate brother” and only assumed the “position of Brown’s boyfriend” after Bobbi Kristina became the sole beneficiary of the Whitney Houston estate following her mother’s death. The suit also claims that Gordon “would limit with whom she could interact,” answering her phone and manipulating her appointments, and would routinely transfer money from Bobbi Kristina’s account to his without her consent.
Even worse, the suit alleges that Gordon committed “substantial bodily harm” to Bobbi Kristina, “including punching her in the face, knocking out a front tooth, and dragging her upstairs by her hair.” And the day before Bobbi Kristina was found unconscious in her bathtub—January 31, 2015—the suit alleges that Bobbi Kristina had “confided to someone” that Gordon was “not the man she thought he was” and wished to set up a time on January 31, 2015, to meet with them to discuss it.“Brown, however, never made it to the meeting,” the suit alleges. “Instead, on the morning of January 31, 2015, Brown became embroiled in a loud argument with [Gordon] at her townhome. The loud argument ended and Brown was later found unresponsive and unconscious, face down in a bathtub, with her mouth swollen and another tooth knocked out.”
“He was known to choke her, definitely,” Reid told E! News. “Throw her into walls. Punch her in the jaw. Just, like, unbelievable stuff.”
Reid was asked why she thought Bobbi Kristina was drawn to Gordon and stayed loyal to him despite the alleged abuse.
“She’s living alone in a house with this guy who’s been there through everything and knows everything that happened, and they also had a lot of negativity between them and the family. So it was like they created this united front of, like, loyalty with each other,” Reid said. “All Krissi wanted was to defend Nick and be happy. So the fact that she would even break down enough to tell me was only, like, momentary because then she would...[say], ‘But don’t be mad at him!’”
According to Reid, Bobbi Kristina and Gordon “weren’t married,” and the only reason Bobbi Kristina said they concocted that lie was to get the family on his side, since so many of them were skeptical of Gordon.
Ultimately, it seems Bobbi Kristina just wanted to be loved.
“To understand Krissi, you have to understand that she is a very soft soul. She’s very soft. She hasn’t been hardened by any of the experiences that she’s had,” said Reid. “She was always looking, ya know, for somebody to connect to, especially after she lost her mom. She used to tell me, like, ‘Alex, there’s no one in the world who loves me. Like, there’s no one who just loves me. My mom. I used to just lay in my mom’s arms in bed and just know that I was loved.’”
E! News asked Reid what she thinks now when she sees pictures of Gordon. “He has this weird, empty smile. And so now, that has such a different impact on me,” she said. “To look at him, it sends chills and I’m horrified. It’s like terror. I see pure evil.”