Jimmie Allen is breaking down in tears, thinking about the day he contemplated suicide after he was accused of sexual assault.
via: Rolling Stone
The hour-long conversation — uploaded onto Allen’s YouTube channel and conducted by the singer’s friend and early supporter Kathie Lee Gifford in the kitchen of her Nashville home — is more of a tearful apology tour missive than a probing Q&A into the circumstances behind the two sexual assault lawsuits, one of which was already settled.
“You got to stay close to Jesus and away from the women,” Gifford said she told Allen early in his career, advice he admittedly did not heed.
“You hear people say, ‘You can have all the success in the world doesn’t bring you happiness,’ and that’s true. On the business side, I was frustrated, I felt like my label didn’t understand me, so everything with that was a fight,” Allen said.
“On the personal side, I found myself trying to be someone other people wanted me to be, but not who I wanted to be. It was my own decision, because I make my own decisions, but I feel like I let people’s version of who I should be rush my life. Meaning, when I got married, I knew I wasn’t ready to be a husband. But I was at this point in my life where I felt like I should do that.”
Allen, who admitted to extramarital affairs outside of the allegations against him, reasoned that “As long as I’m providing for my wife and for my children, I’m good” because he had “the freedom to do whatever I want.”
Allen said after the initial sexual assault lawsuit was filed against him by a former manager in May 2023 — which was ultimately settled last month before it went to court — “the whole world had just collapsed” as he lost his record deal, his PR firm dropped him, business deals were canceled, he was pulled from CMA Fest. and his commencement speech at Delaware State University was called off. In the immediate aftermath, he claims he contemplated suicide.
“The first thing my brain goes to is not really career. It’s how am I going to provide for my kids? I had three [kids] then,” Allen said. “I’m thinking to myself, how am I going to provide for my family? And then it hit me: My life insurance covered suicide.”
He added, “I don’t feel that way now, but in that moment, when you feel like you have nothing… In the midst of a society where it’s no longer innocent until proven guilty. You’re guilty. She said this so it must be true.”
Allen said friends convinced him to carry on, with one friend coming to his house and taking his firearm. The singer added he got phone calls checking in on him from his country peers and “some of the biggest actors in Hollywood,” including “an A-list actor with all these Oscars” that he did not name.
While Allen didn’t touch on the allegations against him specifically over the lengthy chat, he did say that after the first Jane Doe lawsuit, he was “heartbroken because how could someone I thought knew me and cared about me do that to me.” (A second Jane Doe filed a lawsuit in June 2023, accusing Allen of assaulting her in a Las Vegas hotel room and filming them having sex without her knowledge or consent.)
Allen, who said he is largely sober now, added that “the last eight months are the happiest I’ve ever been” and that he would return to music with a new single soon.
Watch the full interview below.
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