It's been seven years since the sad passing of Whitney Houston. Now, the pop great's best friend has decided it's time to reveal intimate details of their relationship.
Robyn Crawford was Houston's best friend and confidante since they first met as teenagers at a summer camp in New Jersey/ They were both camp counsellors.
In her new memoir, she claims that they embarked on a romantic relationship which Houston ended before she signed her first record deal. Rumours surrounding the pair had been longstanding, but were never confirmed by Houston.
"I’d come to the point where I felt the need to stand up for our friendship. And I felt an urgency to stand up and share the woman behind the incredible talent," she says of her memoir 'A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston'. "We wanted to be together - and that meant just us.”
She writes in the book, which is excerpted in People magazine: "It was during that first summer that we met. It was the first time our lips touched. And it wasn’t anything planned, it just happened. And it felt wonderful. And then not long after that we spent the night together. And that evening was the night that we touched. And that just brought us closer."
Crawford said that Houston ended their physical relationship in 1982, when she gave her a 'slate blue bible' as a gift.
“She said we shouldn’t be physical anymore,” she wrote in the book, "because it would make our journey even more difficult. She said if people find out about us, they would use this against us - and back in the ’80s that’s how it felt.
“I kept it safe. I found comfort in my silence.”
She added that Houston's mother has disapproved of their 'closeness'. "We never talked about labels, like lesbian or gay,” she says. “We just lived our lives and I hoped it could go on that way forever.”
Houston went on to marry Bobby Brown and have a daughter, the late Bobbi-Kristina, who died in 2015 at the age of 22. Crawford adopted two children with her partner, Lisa Hintelmann.
The controversial 'An Evening with Whitney: The Whitney Houston Hologram Tour' is coming to Dublin's Bord Gais Energy Theatre next March.
