Her Name Was Dolores Page 12

  Jen allowed Graciela to get under her skin, and played right into her rivalry ploy, feeding the media frenzy when her growl turned into a roar with her song “Los ovarios.” In that song, Jen refers to Graciela, who was known as “La Reina del Pueblo” (The Town’s Queen), by saying “Y las que se dicen ser reinas / son de un pueblo abandonado,” which basically translates to, “and those who call themselves queens / come from an abandoned town.” The song is basically stating that those who dare mess with her don’t know the size of her ovaries. In it, she laughs off all the trash talk and tags her rivals as insignificant now that her fame is soaring. Gabo and I cringed when we heard the song. We knew Jen was better than this, but, in classic Jenni style, rather than thinking it through, she reacted and pounced like a lion on her prey.

  “Why do you want to stir up more trouble?” Gabo asked Jen after the song was released.

  “I’m just doing what the rappers do. They have it out in their songs,” explained Jen.

  “Yeah, that’s accepted in American culture, but our Mexican culture takes offense at this type of sassiness. They see it as a lack of respect. I know you’re gonna do whatever you feel like doing at the end of the day, but just know I don’t agree with this move,” said Gabo.

  As we expected, Graciela jumped at the chance to get the media to side with her after the song hit the airwaves, appearing on TV shows wailing against Jen’s cruel and uncalled-for lyrics. Rather than letting her cry it out and leaving it alone, Jen jumped in to defend herself, explaining she’d had enough with the way Graciela had disrespected her for so long, but it ended up playing against her. The media began to question Jen’s actions, wondering why she did this, why she needed to go there now that she was famous and Graciela’s career wasn’t what it used to be. Even some of her fans started turning against her for acting so arrogantly. Simultaneously, Gabo and I continued trying to talk some sense into Jen. Graciela’s career was going nowhere, and Jen’s actions were only helping Graciela remain relevant in the media. Gabo and I knew that as soon as she stopped feeding this feud, Graciela would go away, and the media’s focus would move on to the next big headline. It was time for Jen to lay this to rest and take the high road, and she finally got it. Since then, Jen took on a neutral role and never allowed Graciela back into the game. And that was that.

  The problem with Jen was that she was always quick to react, too quick for her own good. If she was hit, she’d hit back harder and go straight for the jugular. This happened with friends, lovers, family, employees, and, as much as she loved and appreciated them, her fans were no exception either. If they were out of line, she was the first to call them out, but she didn’t think before she acted, and that sometimes got her into gratuitous trouble.

  Jenni Strikes a Fan with Her Mic

  It happened in Raleigh, North Carolina, in June 2008, at one of Jen’s concerts. She was happily performing to her crowd of adoring fans when suddenly someone flung a beer can onto the stage and hit one of Jen’s band members. Jen took matters into her own hands, but this time she went too far, and the media had a field day.

  Truth be told, Jen had a history of dealing with her rowdy fans in her own way. Stuff like this happened often, since early on in her career. I remember one gig she had in Las Vegas where a macho guy threw a cup of beer at her and, without blinking an eye, she dropped the mic and darted straight at him. I dropped everything and ran behind her, trying to catch up, thinking, What the hell just happened? When it came to the fight or flight reaction, Jen always chose to fight; she never took anything sitting down, never took shit from anyone, even less so from her fans.

  Gabo recalls another incident where a fan threw a lemon at her. She stopped the concert, brought the fan on stage, and slapped her across the face, right then and there, only to find out later that the lemon had a message written on it, “Jenni, I love you! Could you sing my song?” The fans were excited to see their idol and some were quite drunk, so they would do anything to call her attention, not thinking about the consequences. That one fan didn’t throw a lemon at Jen aggressively, but how the hell are you supposed to interpret that when you’re on stage and a flying object suddenly strikes your leg? Another time, a fan threw an ice cube at her and her reaction? She poured a glass filled with ice over his head. I kept telling her, “There are people who are hired to handle these situations. You can’t interfere. You’ve gotta let them do their job. Even if they do something wrong, it’s on them. It’s not your responsibility, because if you intervene, then you become liable and people can sue you.” But she also wanted to be heard. She would be damned if she felt someone was taunting her. She grew up with boys, she was a tomboy, she knew how to defend herself, and she wasn’t one to back down from a fight or confrontation. If Jen felt threatened or attacked, she didn’t take it quietly. She fought back because she wanted to teach her reckless fans a lesson. Everyone was usually buzzed at her concerts, and they usually laughed these confrontations off, until the North Carolina incident where things unintentionally took a turn for the worse.

  I wasn’t there that night, but Gabo was, and he remembers how it unfolded as if it were yesterday. When that can flew on stage and hit one of Jen’s band members, Jen stopped the song in its tracks, faced the audience, and said, “Let’s see if the person who had the balls to throw this can on stage has the balls to raise his hand and come clean.” Now, Jen’s audience was used to her joking around with them, and many jumped at the chance of getting close to her, exchanging a few words, or being invited on stage, so when she said this, four or five people raised their hands. Jen turned to one guy and asked, “Was it you, m’ijo? Was it you?” And he said yes. “Bring him to me, please,” replied Jen. He thought it was all in good fun, as did the rest of the audience. They didn’t think it was serious, but no one messed with her or her band members without suffering the consequences.

  As soon as he climbed on stage, Gabo recalls Jen saying to him, “M’ijo, tell me something. Do you like it when someone bothers you while you’re working?” “No,” answered the guy. “Pos, neither do I,” she said, and smacked him on the forehead with her mic. The guy managed to react before being hit and turned his head to avoid the mic, but wasn’t quick enough, so it landed on his eyebrow, and blood immediately started to trickle down his face. He was quickly removed from the stage by security, but when one of the guards noticed he continued to bleed profusely, he called 911. The ambulance arrived together with the police, who asked who had done this to him. Gabo remembers that most people remained quiet, except for one of the security guards who came forward and said it had been the artist.

  When Jen left the stage that night, she was met by these two police officers who questioned her and immediately arrested her for assaulting a fan, regardless of who had started it. As soon as they drove her away, Gabo grabbed the venue’s promoter and Jenni’s brother, Juan, and they followed the cop car to bail her out. Meanwhile, inside the precinct, as the officers took her mugshot, she made light of the situation, posing for the picture and asking if it was a good take. After a few hours, once they finally released her, she walked out and said to Gabo, “What’s up? What happened? Let’s go grab something to eat,” as if it weren’t that big of a deal, not even thinking about the possible consequences of what had just gone down.

  As the dust of this incident began to settle, I suddenly got wind that the guy was lawyering up and preparing to file a lawsuit against Jen. I reached out to Jen to give her the bad news, and was surprised by her incredulousness.

  “He’s the one who threw the can. How can he sue me?”

  “Yeah, but you’re the one who hit him on stage with a mic, and you’re the famous one that people see as a payday, Jen.”

  She argued with me at first, but I told her she needed to think about it with a clear head. “Everything you worked for that you did for your kids, well, this is now going to cost your kids. Your actions are going to cost your kids.”

  The whole situation really frustrated
me. She was already famous, and there was no need to behave this way. How could she not see it? But she finally did. After all our back and forth, plus the threat of a lawsuit that would now affect her own kids, she realized she had to do something to take care of this once and for all. At last, she admitted that her actions were wrong and personally called the guy to invite him and his family to attend her next concert at Nokia Theater in L.A. It was actually an all-expenses paid weekend, which included a day at Disneyland. The guy accepted and they let bygones be bygones. Little did Jen know that yet another media scandal was already brewing and would soon hit her like a ton of bricks. The price of fame.

  The Sex Tape Scandal

  It all began with a phone call Gabo received from a promotor and friend in Mexico: “Gabriel, there’s a video going around of your artist, and it has some pretty heavy stuff on it. Musicians have been circulating it on their phones.”

  “Wait, what are you talking about?” said Gabo, completely taken aback by the call.

  “Pos, it’s a porn video of your artist, güey.”

  Stunned, Gabo asked if he was sure it was Jenni, and his friend said yes, so Gabo asked him to send it over. His friend was hesitant at first; he didn’t want people thinking he was the one who had started all this, but he finally texted and e-mailed it to Gabo. Meanwhile, Gabo had to figure out a way to break the news to Jen. At first she asked if he was sure. When Gabo explained that he’d asked for a copy to confirm the rumor, she simply said, “Check it out and let me know what’s up.”

  Jen was not only like a sister to me, she was like a sister to Gabo, so having to watch this video made him feel extremely awkward, but Jen insisted. She needed to know if they were bluffing or if there really was a video. So Gabo obliged, and once he received the video, he hesitantly pressed play. In the first scene, she had her clothes on, and her friend was filming her while she spoke on the phone. It was definitely Jen. Then, after she hung up, things started getting a bit more hot and heavy, and that’s when Gabo stopped the video and called Jen and said, “You had a white T-shirt and red pants.”

  Suddenly it all came back to her in a flash. It was a video she had filmed with a guy she was seeing at the time, one of her band members. He was a younger, good-looking man who had caught Jen’s attention. She had simply been having a good time with him. He made her feel sexy and daring, so she was just going with the flow, forgetting that she was already Jenni Rivera the celebrity and just enjoying this newfound adventure. She didn’t think twice about the consequences if this tape was ever leaked to the press. She was just living in the moment. To top it off, the fling came to a screeching end when Jen found out that the guy had lied to her about being separated. Gabo was the one who broke it to her. “Jen, this guy is married.” At first she thought that Gabo was being as protective as always, so she didn’t believe him, but he insisted, until she finally understood that the guy had been lying to her all along. She broke it off then and there, never thinking it would all come back to haunt her later.

  Turns out the guy had a hidden agenda all along. She was just a pawn in his game. His goal was to get with the boss, Jenni Rivera, to better his position in life. Who knows, maybe at first he was hoping to build a solid enough relationship with her to become her go-to guy and reap those benefits, but that dream was cut short when she found out he was still married. Nevertheless, he still managed to make out with a humiliating video, and now he was ready to cash in.

  When the sex tape surfaced, we also found out this guy was trying to sell it to the media. He’d offered it to Univision for around nine thousand dollars, but the deal fell through because we stepped in and intervened, releasing a statement explaining that the video was taken from a phone that was stolen from Jenni. Since the phone was personal property, if anyone published this material, they’d be implicated in the lawsuit. No one in the media touched it. Meanwhile, we also received a call asking for five thousand dollars in exchange for the video, but we already had it, so that bribe was quickly squashed. We were suddenly putting out fires left and right. Ultimately, the video did make the rounds online, but at least it didn’t hit the media outlets.

  Meanwhile, Jen was mortified at first. She couldn’t believe she’d been so naïve about this guy. She never imagined he could be capable of such a thing. But what shamed her the most was having to tell her family about this whole scandal before the news hit the press. She called a family meeting and explained everything, breaking down into tears and asking for their forgiveness. But no one in her family or team judged her. We were all there to support her. She knew she had screwed up, and now it was time to move on. She never allowed it to shame her again and eventually even managed to crack jokes about it, saying it was a tutorial on how to keep your man satisfied. That was Jen right there, a perfect example of how she always managed to gather herself after a fall, get right back up and keep going. As she once wisely said, “If you’re gonna give me lemons, I’m gonna make me some lemonade, with a shot of tequila.”

  Cartels and Jen’s Run-In with the Law

  There’s a reason the catchphrase “Mo’ money, mo’ problems” exists. As Jen’s career thrived, she not only felt responsible as a provider for her entire family and employees, she not only had to deal with bigger media headlines like the feud with Graciela and the altercation with her fan on stage, she not only had to handle people coming out of the woodworks trying to make a buck from her celebrity status with a sex tape, she had even bigger fish to fry: she had to learn how to handle with care the growing number of important people attending her concerts, which in Mexico meant drug lords and their families and lovers.

  When Jen’s popularity took off in Mexico, the army of women drawn to her message and concerts included none other than daughters, girlfriends, wives, and lovers of renowned Mexican cartel bosses. They became fans and regulars at her shows, and now they wanted to meet her. Gabo recalls these first brushes with the cartel families as polite yet edgy and intense. They’d send their people backstage to talk to Gabo, and he’d arrange for the family to meet Jen after the show, and she always obliged these requests. As outspoken and forthright as she was, Jen knew that it was best not to mess with these guys and their families. The families ranged from two to a dozen people, but no matter how many of them showed up at her dressing room, Jen always stopped what she was doing and posed for a photo or set aside a little time to chat with them. Keeping them happy kept all of us safe and, in turn, they were always respectful.

  Then came the invitations to play at private events, birthdays, quinceañeras, you name it. Gabo managed these invites and found ways to politely decline some of them, explaining that Jen’s schedule was completely booked, but there were some that we did accept. It was hard not to. Jen was first and foremost a savvy businesswoman, and it was difficult to turn down gigs that paid so well. It was a lot of damn money. However, these private parties were no joke. First off, we decided that Gabo would be the one to go with her, as he has a smaller build than me and has less of an intimidating presence than my own six-foot, three-hundred-pound self. We didn’t want to ruffle any feathers. The idea was to get Jen in and out of there as quickly as possible. Some bands were basically held captive at these parties, entertaining the bosses until their lips and fingers were swollen from hours of nonstop playing, not daring to say that they were done for the night for fear they might lose their lives. But this wasn’t the case with Jen for two main reasons: she was a woman and they knew she was famous. This meant a busy schedule, it meant she had other shows to get to the following day, so they were happy with her coming in, knocking it out of the park, and then heading home. And they were always very respectful, never demanding songs, but rather making requests. She also had her secret weapon: Gabo. He knew how to handle these situations and events, using his wit and charm to his advantage to secure and get out of any potentially harmful situations. He was a strategist, and I trusted him because he knew what he had to do, and he got it done.

  The thing abo
ut Mexico is that it’s truly littered with cartels. They are unavoidable. Aside from private parties, there were also times she had to deal with police raids in her own concerts. One time, during a palenque performance, Jen was up on stage doing her thing when all of a sudden we noticed this man dashing up the stairs followed by men in full military garb bounding after him. As he weaved through the crowd, people parted to let him by and then closed the way to slow down the Federales who were hot on his trail. It was like watching a live action sequence. And all the while, Jen didn’t skip a beat. She kept belting out her song while giving us sideway glances trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But the show must go on, and the way Jen handled the situation actually helped the concertgoers remain calm instead of entering into mass panic. Once the concert was over, we heard that the Federales had gotten word that El Chango, a wanted cartel member, was attending her concert. I wish I could say this was the only time this happened, but it wasn’t. Since she became popular with the cartels, several of her shows suffered police raids and made the news. That’s why the media oftentimes tried to link Jen to the cartels, but she wasn’t in cahoots with them. They were simply her fans.

  The media always made such a big deal about this possible link between Jen and the cartels that after her death, there was even speculation that renowned cartel leader, Edgar Valdez Villareal, aka La Barbie, had been involved in her accident. This theory was based on a previous rumor that he had allegedly assaulted her at a concert, but neither were true. It was just the media trying to create headlines that didn’t exist. I can’t emphasize this enough—the cartel leaders and members were just Jen’s fans. Every one of the people in these organized crime networks that we dealt with throughout the years were nothing but respectful toward her because she was a señora, a golden rule in the cartel world: you don’t mess with señoras, you respect them. So she was never considered a threat to them. She never celebrated one cartel over another. She was just a woman talking shit about men in her songs, and they got it. They all had women in their lives who were Jenni fans because she was the only woman out there who was ballsy enough to speak her mind, and they all loved her for that.