James Brown’s third wife told a lawyer and a domestic violence advocate that she was afraid for her life. Sheriff’s records, including an account from a neighbour who saw one of the assaults, back up why. She died in 1996, and the case was never fully resolved.
On April 3, 1988, Adrienne Rodriguez called the sheriff’s office in Aiken County, South Carolina, and said her husband, James Brown, had beaten her with a metal pipe, then fired a gun at her car as she tried to leave. A neighbour who saw him shoot called the police herself, before deputies had even arrived. When officers got there, they found a bullet lodged in the trunk, a hole in one of the tires, and, as the responding investigator wrote, “bruises all over her body.” Brown was arrested and charged with assault with intent to murder. He was never prosecuted.
Nothing came of it. Rodriguez died on January 6, 1996, two days after a cosmetic surgery procedure in Beverly Hills. She was 45, born March 9, 1950. She and Brown, one of the most famous musicians in the country, had no children together. Their marriage ran for twelve years.
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Before James Brown
She worked as a hairstylist and makeup artist in television during the early 1980s, on shows including Days of Our Lives and Solid Gold. She met Brown on a set around 1981, and they married in 1984, his third marriage.
Her sister, Susan Hutton, later wrote about their family in a memoir called “Souled Out: Married to the Godfather of Soul.” In it, Hutton describes a childhood in South Central Los Angeles with a grandmother who pulled clumps of hair from Rodriguez’s head and once threatened to cut out her tongue. The two girls used to hide from her in adjoining bedroom closets, talking through gaps in the wall.
In January 1985, three months into the marriage, Rodriguez and Brown appeared at a court hearing in Baltimore over unpaid debts. When a lawyer pressed Brown to hand over cash from his wallet, she shouted, “You want his blood, too?” Eight years later, when Augusta, Georgia, named a street after Brown, he thanked her from the stage for standing by him “during some very, very hard times.”
What the police record shows
The April shooting was not the first sign of trouble that year. Four days earlier, on March 31, Rodriguez had already called the same sheriff’s office to say Brown came home, got a rifle, forced her out of the house and fired at her as she left. She told deputies then that she didn’t want to press charges. Rodriguez filed for divorce later that year, but the marriage continued.
More than six years passed before the next documented case:
- In December 1994, deputies found her bleeding from a cut lip. Brown was charged with domestic violence. Rodriguez asked a judge to drop the case three months later.
- On October 31, 1995, Brown was arrested again. Rodriguez had a bloody nose and swollen lips. A company statement issued in her name weeks afterward blamed a mirror.
None of it ever led to a conviction.
What she told the people trying to help her
A few days before she died, Rodriguez left a voicemail for her divorce lawyer, Robert Harte. She said she believed the people around her husband were controlling him, that she was trying to help him get away from their influence, and that she was afraid for her life. Harte and his wife both heard the message. By the time they tried to call back, she hadn’t left a number.
Kay Mixon, a domestic violence advocate who had spent hours with Rodriguez in hospital after an earlier assault, remembered something close to it.
“I know everything about James. He’s not going to let me ever leave him, because I know too much.”
How Adrienne Rodriguez died
She had liposuction on January 4, 1996, and was recovering at a Beverly Hills aftercare facility called Hidden Garden when she collapsed two days later. She was taken to Century City Hospital and pronounced dead that afternoon.
At the time, coroner’s spokesman Scott Carrier said investigators saw no sign of foul play and that final results were still weeks away. When the coroner’s office released its findings in February, the cause was recorded as a combination of heart disease and PCP intoxication, along with therapeutic levels of prescription painkillers. She was buried in Augusta, Georgia, on January 16, 1996.
A notebook that surfaced years later
In 2001, a police informant named Linda Bennett left Beverly Hills detective Steve Miller a notebook, not long before he retired that year. He looked through a few pages and put it away. James Brown died in 2006, ten years after Rodriguez. In 2017, while investigating unresolved questions around Brown’s own death, a CNN reporter tracked down Miller, by then long retired, and he went back through his old files. That’s when he reread the notebook properly.
In it, Bennett claimed a doctor had confessed to killing Rodriguez by tampering with her medication during her recovery. One line read, “This was premeditated murder.” CNN spent two years tracing the claim. Reporters located the doctor named in the notebook. He denied everything and said he had since been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. No charges were ever filed. The coroner’s original case file on Rodriguez’s death has since been reported destroyed.
