Milli Vanilli's Fabrice Morvan recalls media's cruel suicide jokes and Rob Pilatus's last days: 'I tried forever to save him'
"When I was looking at my friend, my brother, I was like, 'Man, he's gone. There's no way I can get him back,'" says the surviving member of the disgraced duo, whose story is finally being told "in the right way" in a new documentary.
“It's really interesting to see when the screening was happening,” muses surviving Milli Vanilli member Fabrice Morvan. “People 35 and up, they knew the story. But then the younger generation, they’re like, ‘What are they mad about?’”
Morvan is discussing Paramount+’s new cautionary-tale documentary Milli Vanilli, which chronicles the meteoric rise and even quicker catastrophic fall of the disgraced soul-pop duo. Morvan and his best friend and bandmate, Rob Pilatus, lost everything — their fans, their record deal, their Best New Artist Grammy, their self-respect, and in the tragic case of Pilatus, even his life — in 1990, after it was discovered that they had not sung on their 6 million-selling debut album, Girl You Know It's True.
The irony is not lost on Morvan that most modern pop stars lip-sync or rely on AutoTune and other studio effects — and those artists experience almost no backlash nowadays. “Today, it’s like TikTok lip-synching challenge. It's become the norm,” he chuckles.
But for years, Morvan wasn’t able to laugh so freely when discussing his former band, because Milli Vanilli was a punchline. And the “jokes” weren’t all that funny.
“I remember being at a radio station and someone, one of the DJs, said, ‘Oh, something just fell out the window.’ And so I looked, and I was like, ‘Really?’ And then he said, ‘Oh, I thought it was Rob!’ I was like, ‘What?’ Because Rob had attempted suicide,” Morvan shockingly reveals, recalling one adversarial interview he conducted after the lip-synching scandal. “That's when I realized, ‘Wow, you guys have no respect for human beings. We're no longer a human being. We're a product, and there's no holds barred. You can insult us, belittle us, bully us. We are just a product. It don't matter.’ When they made that joke, I was like, ‘Man, you guys lost your minds.’”
But now, despite all he has been through, Morvan seems upbeat in his Yahoo Entertainment interview, saying he’s “super-excited that finally, the story is being told — and is told in the right way” in Milli Vanilli. “People believed the headlines. Everyone knows the headlines. So, early on in the documentary, right away, you realize there was a producer, and there was a record company. I think we're at a time now when [younger viewers] are more savvy about how the music industry works and the packaging that happens behind the artist, but it was tough for me to hold my tongue, because for 30 years I was just scratching the surface, knowing all this. But I knew that in the end, I'm not the villain.”
The true "villain" of Milli Vanilli is no doubt Frank Farian. The veteran German record producer had pulled a similar stunt in the 1970s with successful Eurodisco act Boney M. (whose flamboyant frontman, Bobby Farrell, didn’t sing on that group’s records), and it was Farian who plucked the naive and struggling Morvan and Pilatus from the Munich club scene and made them the faces — but not the voices — of his new project, Milli Vanilli. According to Morvan’s claims in the documentary, the two handsome young dancers, who’d been in a short-lived ‘80s pop band called Empire Bizarre, were unaware of what they were getting into when they signed their contract, assuming they’d have the opportunity to sing and they would only release one single.
But after that single, “Girl You Know It’s True,” became a hit in Europe, Farian greenlit a full album — and Morvan says they learned it would be impossible to get out of their contract without paying back all the money that Farian’s production company had already invested in Milli Vanilli's promotion. So, they went along with it, got sucked into the fame vortex, and eventually started to believe their own hype.
“Of course, I embraced the lie. I was part of it, coming from nothing, wanting to live my dream,” Morvan explains. “I trusted [Farian’s team] — then they manipulated us to get what they wanted. We tasted this life, the pop-star life, coming from a background where love was not really prevalent in our homes. Rob was adopted, was in an orphanage [for the first four years of his life], and it didn't go well in the orphanage. So, you have someone that is going into this industry broken emotionally, trying to fill up this void — and now, pop music success fills up that void.”
Pop music stardom came quickly for the duo, especially once their 1988 debut album for German record label Hansa, the perhaps too prophetically titled All or Nothing, was repackaged in 1989 for the U.S. market as Girl You Know It’s True. Throughout Milli Vanilli, various executives at the duo's American label, Arista Records, insist that they had no idea that it was the vocals of seasoned studio singers Charles Shaw, John Davis, and Brad Howell on the album. But in one of the film’s more amusing sequences, it is pointed out that Morvan and Pilatus weren’t actually credited on the international All or Nothing release... and those label employees react in a comically deer-in-headlights manner, suddenly caught in their own lie.
“What makes me cringe is that the music executives who worked on the project, that were part of it, they were not willing to just speak the truth. Dude, who are you backing up? It's been such a long time,” Morvan says incredulously.
Whether or not the people behind the scenes at Arista were in on the secret, public speculation that Milli Vanilli didn’t sing on Girl You Know It’s True began when a disgruntled Shaw went to the media to announce that he was one of the three actual vocalists on the LP. The rumors only escalated once Pilatus and Morvan started reluctantly doing promotional appearances in the States, and their thick accents — Morvan was born in France, Pilatus in Germany — sounded very different from the robust, soulful voices on No. 1 hits like “Girl I'm Gonna Miss You,” “Baby Don’t Forget My Number,” and the Diane Warren-penned “Blame It On the Rain.” As much as Morvan and Pilatus were enjoying the perks of their newfound global fame, they were buckling under the pressure to keep up the ruse.
“If [we] spoke [in our foreign accents], they would find out. So, when people say, ‘Oh, they were arrogant,’ it was just a protection mechanism not to talk to people, because we didn't want to speak,” Morvan says of that heady but stressful time. “I was partying, as well. I was partying — medicating. That's what I was doing. I don't call it ‘partying,’ really. It was medicating ourselves to cope. It was a coping mechanism, in order to be able to carry this lie that was getting heavier with every millions of record being sold, because then it becomes a prison. It was a golden cage, but it was still a cage which we couldn't get out of.”
The public’s hatred of Milli Vanilli was raging well before they were outed — not by a lip-synching playback snafu on the Club MTV tour (as is the urban legend), or even by Shaw’s bombshell revelation, but by Farian himself, as retaliation when Morvan and Pilatus demanded to sing on Milli Vanilli’s forthcoming second album. And much of that pre-scandal scorn seemed to be rooted in racism and xenophobia: Late-night hosts and comedy sketch shows regularly poked fun at the duo’s braided hair, colorful fashions, dance moves, foreign accents, and broken English, all of which Morvan said made them an “easy target.”
“It was mean-spirited,” Morvan recalls. “Nowadays, I don't think you could do that. You could never do that. But back then they were like, ‘OK, whatever works!’ Even if it was in poor taste, they did it, and there was no protection when it came to Rob and Fab. There was no protection. So, they were able to have fun with it. … It was easy to make people laugh.”
There was absolutely no protection in place for Morvan and Pilatus once Farian came forward and the scandal exploded. “When we joined forces with the label, we thought of it as a family, like, ‘Wow, it's going to be great!’ And then suddenly when things started to get hard, they were cutting the personal contact,” says Morvan, who recalls Milli Vanilli’s gold and platinum plaques being immediately taken down from the Arista office walls. The label dropped Milli Vanilli from its roster, offered partial refunds to anyone who’d purchased a Milli Vanilli record, and for a while even deleted Girl You Know It’s True from its catalog. And because “the publicists were gone” and “the gatekeepers behind it were untouchable at this time,” Morvan and Pilatus, left to fend for themselves, organized their own (ill-fated) press conference to officially return their 1990 Best New Artist Grammy trophies and attempt explain their side of the story — an explanation that unfortunately fell on the outraged attending journalists’ deaf ears.
Morvan handled this vicious backlash much better than Pilatus did, which he attributes to the fact that he always knew deep down they’d eventually be found out. “I was on the edge. I was lucky in that I foresaw what was about to happen, that it was going to stop, that it was not forever. So, I kind of protected myself,” he explains. “Rob was the one who was speaking the lie and ended up believing the lie. I think that he was not able to catch himself from falling any deeper because of the pain — and the fact that he thought it would go on forever.”
Morvan admits, “It was hard, even for me, to look at myself in a mirror. It was hard not to hear those insults and the bullying happening. You look at yourself and you say, ‘Is that really me?’ … I knew it was going to be really difficult to regain anything, any of the credibility.” But he went to rehab, fell in love and started a family, and eventually rebuilt a solo career and even proved he could actually sing. Meanwhile, Pilatus started to steadily spiral downward — especially after the duo’s next album, released under the band name Rob & Fab in 1992 and featuring their real voices, sold only 2,000 copies, thus dashing any hopes of a comeback. Pilatus entered 11 times over seven years and served three months in prison for assault, vandalism, and attempted robbery, and he eventually became estranged from Morvan, who was focused on his own sobriety and recovery. In one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the Milli Vanilli doc, Morvan recalls running into Pilatus on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip outside the notorious Viper Room.
“That was one of the last times that I saw him,” says Morvan. “I saw his eyes, because a car passed by and he lit up his eyes. I was like, ‘Oh, I’d know those eyes anywhere in the world!’ That's why I walked over. But the shell of his body didn't look nothing. He was masculine [before], and now he was really skinny, scrawny. And his eyes — you could see he was gone. He was an addict that was rolling around on the floor, trying to sit on the curb, trying to recover because he had done way too much of whatever he was doing. And I tried to bring him back home. I was like, ‘OK, I don't know where he lives.’ We were not truly talking at this time anymore.” Once Morvan figured out Pilatus’s Hollywood address and escorted him to the door, “After we rang and they took him in, when I came in, I was like, ‘Oh. That's a crackhouse, right there. My God.’
“Now we all know that if you have an issue, you should go and see a therapist, otherwise you're going to stay broken. And that's something that Rob didn't get a sense to do. So, when he went into drug addiction to carry this weight and this confusion, it broke him down, and he became so addicted to the drugs that then it changed him, totally,” Morvan continues somberly. “When I was looking at my friend, my brother, I was like, ‘Man, he's gone. There's no way I can get him back.’”
Pilatus died at age 33 from an alcohol and prescription drug overdose on April 3, 1998, almost exactly a decade after “Girl You Know It’s True’s” initial European release; he was found in a Frankfurt hotel room by Farian’s secretary, Ingrid “Milli” Segieth, with whom he had remained friends. (Farian, who unsurprisingly declined to be interviewed for in Milli Vanilli, did not attend Pilatus’s actual funeral in Munich, according to the documentary, but he showed up later to speak with the press and pose for a photo opp.)
At the time of Pilatus’s death, Morvan released a statement to People that said, “The only disgrace is how Rob died — all alone, destroyed from the rapid rise then sudden fall.” These days, Morvan tries not to dwell on any survivor's guilt over the fact that his friend is not here to see the documentary or experience this new wave of love, support, and most of all empathy for what Milli Vanilli endured.
“I tried forever to save him,” Morvan states. “I tried until I was told, ‘Listen, you’ve got to take care of yourself now.’ When it comes to addiction, which is a sickness, you have to do the job. Nobody can do it for yourself. I thought I could do it for him. But love is all you can give — love, help him, and say, ‘I'm there for you. Whatever you need, I'll be there.’
“Life is not a sprint. I understood that it's a marathon. So, I'm not in my twenties anymore, but skill-wise, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and now I'm here. And we'll see what happens,” adds Morvan, who is excited about his forthcoming new solo music and still regularly performs live, singing not only his own originals but also Milli Vanilli’s hits, now in his own voice.
“But we paid a price as human beings,” says Morvan. “We paid a price.”
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If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call 911 or the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-8255, or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.
