While the VH1 biopic Crazy Sexy Cool: The TLC Story got rave reviews and a record 4 million viewers for the network, there’s one person who was not a fan. That was TLC’s former manager, Perri “Pebbles” Reid, who says she was falsely portrayed in the film, where she was played by Rochelle Aytes. Pebbles has made the rounds of the talk show and radio circuits professing her innocence in the bankruptcy proceedings and the miserly financial compensation that TLC, once the biggest selling girl group of all time, received.
Accusations of cheating and lying have flown back and forth between Pebbles and the group’s surviving members Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins and “Rozonda “Chili” Thomas. (Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes died in a car accident in 2000.) Ashley Reid, Pebbles’ now grown daughter, threatened to confront Chili, who she called everything but a child of God in a now deleted Ustream post. Thomas and Watkins, executive producers on the movie maintain that they are telling the truth. Pebbles says she treated the group like daughters and that their financial issues were their own fault.
You can listen above to what she had to say and see how credible you believe she is (we’re on the fence here). Here’s what she had to say this morning on the Tom Joyner Morning Show.
On her portrayal in Crazysexycool: The TLC Story. It is not a true story as VH1 and TLC has claimed. A lot of these things did not happen. Finally, VH1 has come forward and made a statement to me in a letter that it was a fictional portrayal that was done with actors and scripts and by no means was meant to try to recreate any historical event and any reasonable person would have never taken it as the truth.
On why no one has defended her since TLC’s allegations first surfaced years ago.I haven’t managed a lot of people. I have helped a lot of people. I have opened the door for a tremendous amount of people and helped get LaFace Records on the map. I can’t speak for other people. I can only speak for what I know to be true. What I can’t do here is to try to get people to believe something that VH1 said was a true story all the time.
Pebbles on TLC: ‘The Money Flows Down From the Top; That’s Who’s Got the Money’ was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
