Understandably, Jennifer Hudson has been reluctant to talk about the October 2008 tragic murder of her mother, brother and young nephew by her sister’s estranged boyfriend. However, on last night’s episode of VH1’s Behind the Music, the singer tackles the subject head on, describing the immediate aftermath of the killings as, “surreal” adding that, “It was like I was outside of myself… For almost two weeks straight… [I was] inside one room with just family and friends coming in and out. I prayed when I’d get up in the morning and prayed before I laid down at night.”
At the 2009 Grammy’s Jennifer sang the emotional ballad, “You Pulled Me Through” and now she says what many were speculating after her courageous (and flawless) performance. “I was definitely thinking of my family when I was singing that song,” Jennifer tells VH1. “I could hear my [late] brother in my head, like, ‘Jennifer, you need to kill this, you need to get up and do it.’ I knew he would be disappointed if I didn’t do it justice.”
Now a mother herself, Jennifer says she “honors the family members she lost by returning to work and raising her son in the same loving environment her own mother created for her,” adding that the birth of her son has helped with her grieving.
In addition to Jennifer, Behind the Music interviewed her sister Julia, Randy Jackson, Jamie Foxx, Queen Latifah, Whitney Houston, Ne-Yo, Robin Thicke, Clive Davis, and many others for the episode. Watch the episode preview below, and visit VH1 for more clips of the singer.
It was so sad to hear about what happened to this wonderful young woman’s family. It’s enough to lose a family member but to lose almost all of them in one night, I can’t even imagine what that could / would do to a person. Something of this magnitude might have ended a lesser person’s will to continue on with their life but she picked herself up and did everything she could to be even more successful. This is someone to be admired.