Drew Dixon, who worked as the A&R director at Russell Simmons Def Jams Records, spoke out to BuzzFeed News claiming her former boss once pushed her into a broom closet and tried to kiss her. Dixon recalled a harrowing account of how Simmons allegedly harassed her multiple times.
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“He would come in my office, shut the door, lock it, and push me against the wall, expose himself,” Dixon told Audie Cornish in an episode of BuzzFeed News’ Facebook Watch show Profile that aired Sunday night — her first on-camera interview discussing the alleged sexual assault.
“You could say I should’ve quit. I look back now; I would want my daughter to quit,” Dixon said. “I also wanted to prove to people that I could do this. I love hip-hop.”
On time, she said her former boss asked her to stop by his apartment in 1995, to listen to a CD. Dixon said she went since it was for work purposes.
“I walk in, I immediately had this sort of uncomfortable feeling like, Why is it so quiet?”
Dixon said Simmons told her where to find the CD but he went to the bathroom and came back and “he was not wearing any clothes and it became very violent, very quickly.”
Through his lawyer, Simmons acknowledged that he engaged in “inappropriate conduct” with Dixon while she worked at Def Jam. Dixon recalled one night in which Simmons offered to order her a cab from a bar near his home. After entering his apartment to wait for the cab, she said, Simmons forced himself on her.
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“I just blacked out,” Dixon said in a previous interview. “The last thing I remember was him pinning me down to kiss me on the bed.”
She told Buzzfeed: “Russell was dead wrong, and what he did to me and to these other women. But I also understand that the vilification of Russell Simmons makes innocent black men more vulnerable in our society, because it adds credence to this mythology of the predatory black man.”
Click here to watch the Buzzfeed interview with Drew Dixon.