For nearly three years, Dawn Robinson, who formerly performed with En Vogue, has been living in her car. Six months after her last YouTube post, the singer returned to her channel this week to explain her experience navigating her recent living conditions and why she wants to be seen as vulnerable and courageous rather than the overall takeaway being “woe is me.”
Robinson made the reveal three minutes into an 18-minute long video, exclaiming: “Oh my God, I said it — it’s out.” She repeated her confession once more with a sense of relief about no longer holding that particular secret. “I have a gym membership and I shower there,” she said. “I’m not a funky diva. But I wouldn’t trade any of what I’ve gone through. I miss my family but I’m proud of me and I’d rather be on my own right now and see my family when it’s time.”
Robinson spent some time living with her parents in Las Vegas around five years ago, but said her mother “became very angry and a lot of her anger she was taking out on me.” When she left their home, she stayed in the area and lived out of her car for about a month. She then received an offer from one of her managers at the time to come stay with him in Los Angeles. “When I got to his place, he actually didn’t have room for me,” she said. “So it turned into, ‘I’m going to put you up in a hotel for the night.’ That one night turned into eight months. I was like, no, this is unacceptable.”
When Robinson would tour potential apartments, she continued, she kept the manager updated through videos and invitations to view them with her, though she says he never showed. “I would take a video and send it to him, and he’s like, ‘No, oh my God, this neighborhood. I hate it,’” she said. “I’m like, dude, I’m the one who has to live here.” The apartments she saw were around $1,700 in rent, versus the $3,000 she said her manager was paying for her weekly hotel stays for eight months.
“People want to trap you and keep you in a situation where you’re vulnerable and depending on them,” Robinson said. “I wasn’t the one, so yeah I got out of there.” She started researching “car life,” a community of people who live out of vans, cars, and RVs. She left the hotel on March 9, 2022 and went all-in on car life in Malibu.
“That first night was scary,” she said. “But then, as I got to know what to do in my car and how to do it, like how to cover my windows and you don’t talk to certain people. You’re careful of telling people that you’re alone, as a woman especially, and I’m a celebrity — I don’t just divulge that to people. If you don’t know who I am, I’m not telling you that part.”
Robinson is still in close contact with three people who are “keeping me going,” including the mother of her former partner, her assistant, and her brother.
“This is not like, ‘Oh my God, poor Dawn. She’s living in her car and it’s terrible and woe is me,’” she said. “I’m learning about who I am, I’m learning myself as a person, as a woman. If you would have said to me while I was in En Vogue, ‘You’re going to be living in your car one day,’ I would have been like, ‘Huh? No, I’m always going to have an apartment. I can’t live in my car. How can I do that?’ We say that we can’t do certain things before we even know we’re capable.”
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