Former En Vogue member Dawn Robinson has shared that she's been living in her car for almost three years.
The singer, who was part of En Vogue from its inception in 1989 until 2011, opened up about her situation a video on her YouTube channel but insisted it is not a "woe is me" story.
"You guys, for the past almost three years, I have been living in my car. I said it! Oh my God, it's out," she said.
Robinson was staying with her parents in Las Vegas until tensions with her mother led her to leave. She moved to Los Angeles, where her former co-manager offered her a place to stay, but that arrangement quickly fell apart. Robinson then spent eight months living in a hotel, searching for an apartment, only to have her co-manager veto every option.
"Sometimes I think people want to trap you and keep you in a situation where you're vulnerable and depending on them, and I wasn't the one," Robinson said. "So yeah, I got out of there."
She started exploring the idea of "car life" and found herself drawn to it, thinking, "Wow, I could actually do this." Now living in her car in Malibu, Robinson maintains a gym membership for shower access.
"That first night was scary," she recalled. "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 stressed that "this is not like, 'Oh my God, poor Dawn. She's living in her car and it's terrible and woe is me.'"
"I'm learning about who I am, I'm learning myself as a person, as a woman," she said. "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."
Robinson left En Vogue in 2011 following a disagreement about recording a new album, Variety reported. She briefly rejoined the group in 2019 for a performance honoring Epic Records CEO Sylvia Rhone, which led to discussions of a potential tour, but it never came to fruition.