Sounds like TLC’s problems with former manager Perri “Pebbles” Reid weren’t just of the financial variety. Three weeks after the premiere of VH1’s CrazySexyCool biopic about the smash 1990s girl group — and two decades after the release of TLC’s debut album Ooooooohhh… On the TLC Tip — Pebbles is finally ready to tell her side of the story of what went wrong between her and group members Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes, and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas.
Appearing on The Wendy Williams Show on Wednesday, Nov. 13, Pebbles defended herself against claims that she mismanaged the trio’s money and forced them into bankruptcy. She also threw out a few allegations of her own — including that Chilli had an affair with her then-husband, L.A. Reid.
Pebbles admitted she never actually caught the two in flagrante, but told Williams she “absolutely” believed they were sleeping together behind her back. (She and Reid divorced not long after her falling out with TLC.)
“I suspected a couple of things, but I didn’t want to believe that [at the time],” she said of the alleged affair. “For years, I didn’t want to believe that because I felt like they were daughters to me.”
So what changed her mind? “I am going to write my book and put it in there, but believe me when I say, I saw a couple of things,” she teased.
Pebbles — a well-known R&B singer herself in the late 1980s, with hits like “Girlfriend” and “Mercedes Boy” — also spoke with Williams about rumors that she kicked Chilli out of the group. “Absolutely not,” she said.
“T-Boz and Left-Eye did. [They kicked her out] because of what they said was happening in the studio. That [Chilli dating producer Dallas Austin] was a conflict of interest,” Pebbles, now a minister, explained.
She continued: “I sat them down early on and said, ‘Establish how you want to be a unit so you can keep your communication together. Make rules. Don’t cross these rules.’ You have three girls. You gotta keep them together…Everybody is going to gravitate [to other people] — hell, I married my producer. That was love. But what I’m saying is this, they did not like it, they did not want it. And it is the truth.”
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The TLC biopic, on the other hand, is not the truth, Pebbles alleged. “The supposed true story is not true,” she told Williams of the made-for-TV movie, “and VH1 will be hearing from me.”
Chilli and T-Boz, for their part, stand by the film. “Yall need 2 watch what church yall walk n2 cuz I’ll tell ya sum of these so called MINISTERS might get struck down by lightning at any moment,” both singers tweeted in response to Pebbles’ interview.
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