Lionel Richie was involved in one of the most infamous scandals of the 1980s.
The incident involved his first wife Brenda Harvey-Richie who was arrested in 1988 after she confronted Diane Alexander, the star of his 1986 “Dancing on the Ceiling” music video. Harvey-Richie discovered that her estranged husband was at Diane’s Beverly Hills apartment.
In his memoir Truly, the Grammy-winner describes it as “the scandal of my century.”
“What very few people knew was that Brenda and I were separated,” Richie said. “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.”
Lionel said he was driving into town one morning and happened to “stop to see Diane.”
“Shortly after I arrive, there is a knock at the door,” he recalled. “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 question is—How to stop it? How do you physically move a tragedy that is exploding in front of you?”
After Lionel and Brenda left the apartment, the “Hello” said his then-wife “went back and resumed the argument.”
“The neighbors called the police,” he remembered. “Charges were brought and then dropped.”
According to The Los Angeles Times, Brenda was arrested “on suspicion of corporal injury to a spouse, resisting arrest, and battery.” Lionel said he was “kicked in the stomach area.”
Lionel said the incident “took on a life of its own.”
“The most painful part, the tragedy of our lives, was that Brenda was heartbroken,” he wrote. “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.”
Eventually, Lionel and Brenda divorced in 1993 after 18 years of marriage. Two years later, he married Diane. They divorced in 2004.