Dame Dash

Dame Dash Talks About Aaliyah’s Death

Dame Dash has reflected on Aaliyah’s death, stating that if he was there, things would have gone down differently.

In an interview with The Real, Dash talked about the tragic passing of Aaliyah, who died after her small plane crashed in August 2001 during take-off. She was attempting to fly back to Miami after shooting a music video in the Bahamas. Dame Dash, who was dating the superstar at the time, suggested that if he was there with Aaliyah, they would have never gotten on that plane.

“There’s no chance that if I was there, we would’ve been on that plane,” he explains. “It would’ve never happened that way. Aaliyah and I was in Miami. She was shooting a video in Miami and I was in Miami with State Property. She was gonna do a record with Freeway.”

Dash explains that it was director, Hype Williams, who ended up deciding to move the video shoot to the Bahamas (a choice which I imagine haunted him for some time), while Dash couldn’t make the trip as he had to go back to New York because he had court and his son’s football game to attend. Dash explains that as they were texting, it became apparent that Aaliyah felt uneasy about the plane.

“She told me she was going to the Bahamas, and I was against it, like, ‘Yo, don’t go.’ And then down to the last — we had the Blackberry — down to the last Blackberry that we had, before she went there, she was like, ‘Yo, I don’t like that plane. And I was like, ‘Don’t get on it.’ And she was just like, ‘You know, I gotta do it.’ You know, it was a complicated situation, but she had to go do that video, If I was there, I woulda made sure that that jet that was supposed to be for her, the G4, she woulda been on that. I wouldn’t have got on that plane. So it probably would’ve been different.

While there’s obviously no guarantee that things would actually have been different had Dame Dash been there with Aaliyah, it’s obvious from the interview that this isn’t the first time Dash has thought or spoken about this, and even though it’s been 15 years, the memory is as vivid for him now as it was then.

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