Brandy is letting the truth set her free in her new memoir “Phases,” and one of the most startling revelations is her account of a teenage relationship with Boyz II Men’s Wanya Morris. 

Brandy said the relationship began when she was 16, and Morris was in his early 20s, and that what she once thought was love now seems, in hindsight, like a painful imbalance of power. The two singers collaborated on the song “Brokenhearted” in 1994 and started getting closer after that. 

"I was in over my head. Sneaking around with Wanya and lying to my parents had become a constant. They barely liked the idea of me dating at all, and telling them about us was out of question," Brandy wrote. The 47-year-old songstress now says the relationship left her feeling manipulated and ashamed, and that she is no longer carrying that silence alone. 

"But it wasn’t just about upsetting — or disappointing — my parents," she continued. "Wanya and I understood, with diamond-cut clarity, that public knowledge of our relationship would ignite scandal, potentially threatening everything we'd both worked for, so he and I opted for elaborate fiction: we would pretend patience and claim we were waiting until my eighteenth birthday before pursuing any romantic connection."

Brandy also said she lost her virginity to Morris and, over time, started noticing warning signs she ignored because she believed she was in love. She said that they broke up after she discovered (and he admitted) that he was cheating.

Now, Brandy is naming the harm plainly. “I believe he took advantage,” she wrote, adding, “The shame ends here. The silence ends here.” She also shared, “I was a child. And he was an adult,” making clear that the version of the story she once carried privately no longer belongs to secrecy. Morris has previously described the relationship as youthful love, but Brandy said that version of their story misses the power gap at the center of it. 

"I was not a fast girl with a crush. I was not a dramatic teenager who couldn't handle rejection. I was not an unstable obsessive fan. And it's time the world understood the difference,” Brandy boldly wrote.

This is bigger than celebrity memoir tea. It is Brandy reclaiming her narrative, naming the difference between girlhood and adulthood, and refusing to let her truth be hidden.