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Brandy has come clean with intimate details about her long-rumored romantic relationship with Boyz II Men singer Wanya Morris.
The Grammy Award-winning singer admitted to dating Morris when she was 16, and he was 22, in an excerpt from her new memoir, Phases, which debuted on Tuesday, March 31. Brandy explains that their relationship began a year after they met. Their mentor-mentee relationship progressed after the two went on tour together.
"What had begun as admiration had transformed into something else," Brandy writes, per EW. "It seems to me that he weaponized my admiration, shaped my friendship into dependence, my respect into desire. I felt swept up in a current I couldn’t control."
"We moved around each other like opposing magnets — as if actively trying to maintain distance even as we kept finding ourselves drawn into each other’s orbit," she continues. "The attraction was subtle yet undeniable. It lived in the pauses between conversations, and it lingered in the charged atmosphere surrounding us."
Things began to intensify after they shot the music video for their collaboration, "Brokenhearted." Brandy admits she had to hide her relationship with Wanya from her family due to the "illicit nature" of it. She later testifies to how she felt after the two had sex for the first time. She says the experience "lacked the specialness I had painted in my mind, because it wasn't about me at all." She also feels that she was "too young to recognize she was being used." Their relationship ended after she discovered Morris' relationship with his assistant and multiple other women.
"I was young and inexperienced, and thought that following my heart meant following his lead, that what we shared transcended ordinary rules and limitations," Brandy writes.
"I was sixteen years old, dealing with the infidelity of a grown man who I believe had pursued me, took my innocence, and was now revealing he'd not been faithful," she adds. "I may have been young, but I was wise enough to know I had been played. And that wasn't love."
Both artists spent years denying the romantic and sexual elements of their relationship. As of this report, Morris has not addressed Brandy's memoir.