Aaliyah’s ex-boyfriend Damon “Dame” Dash revealed her final texts expressing fear about the plane that killed her.
Dash, 50, said in an interview published Tuesday that the R&B singer messaged him before boarding the doomed flight from the Bahamas on August 25, 2001. The businessman spoke out on the 25th anniversary of the “Princess of R&B’s” death, sharing details he said he had carried for decades about her last communications.
“She texted me saying, ‘I don’t like the plane.’ I told her, ‘Don’t get on it,'” Dash said.
“However, she said she had to do it for the video,” he continued, referring to Aaliyah’s trip to film the “Rock the Boat” music video in the Bahamas.
Dash added that Aaliyah’s anxiety about flying was well-established. “She knew the plane wasn’t right, and she was always scared of planes,” he said. The entrepreneur described how the 22-year-old singer would travel with a “satin pillow” and “called it her good-luck pillow.”
He speculated that Aaliyah ultimately decided to board the aircraft because she wanted to return to him quickly. “She said, ‘I am just going to do this video then come right back,'” Dash recalled.
The interview aligned with previous accounts of Aaliyah’s final hours. In Kathy Iandoli’s 2022 biography “Baby Girl: Better Known as Aaliyah,” an eyewitness alleged that the singer had vocalized concerns about the plane and was given a pill by a team member after complaining of a headache.
Kingsley Russell, who was working for a transportation company at the time, claimed in the biography that Aaliyah was carried onto the twin-engine Cessna 402B while asleep around 6:50 p.m.
The crash killed all nine people on board. Along with Aaliyah, the victims were her bodyguard Scott Gallin, 41; glam team members Anthony Dodd, 34, Christopher Maldonado, 32, and Eric Forman, 29; music executives Gina Smith, 30, and Douglas Kratz, 28; and her friend Keith Wallace, 49. Pilot Luis Antonio Morales, 30, was also killed.
Investigations later revealed multiple failures that contributed to the tragedy. Morales was not approved to fly the aircraft. He was also found to have been under the influence of alcohol and cocaine. The plane was overloaded by 700 pounds, and the weight onboard was not evenly distributed.
The aircraft crashed less than a minute after leaving the runway and caught fire.
In the viral moment that has defined her legacy, Aaliyah’s “Rock the Boat” video was released posthumously in October 2001, two months after her death. The visual became one of the most celebrated works of her career, showcasing her evolution as an artist in what would be her final video. Her parents, Michael and Diane Haughton, filed a lawsuit against Instinct Productions, the video production company that coordinated her transportation in the Bahamas. The family reached an undisclosed settlement with the company in 2003.
Dash’s revelations about Aaliyah’s final texts added a poignant personal dimension to the quarter-century memorialization of her death. The couple had been in a relationship at the time of the crash, with Dash later describing their bond as intense and immediate. His account suggested that Aaliyah’s intuition about the flight’s danger had been overridden by professional obligations and her desire to reunite with him.
The music executive has spoken periodically about his grief in the years since the crash, often emphasizing what he described as Aaliyah’s premonition about the flight. His latest comments came as fans and family members marked the anniversary across social media, with the outlet also publishing reflections from other loved ones about her final days and the lingering questions surrounding the crash.
Aaliyah’s influence on R&B and pop culture has persisted in the decades since her death, with her music remaining widely streamed and her style frequently referenced by younger artists.