Singer Toni Braxton finally broke her silence after her sister, Tamar Braxton, was hospitalized on July 16 following an alleged suicide attempt. Tamar also opened up about her health battle and called out WE tv for taking advantage of her and ignoring her wishes to be released from her contract. Braxton, Tamar and their sisters Traci Braxton, Towanda Braxton, and Trina Braxton star in WE tv’s long-running Braxton Family Values reality series with their mother Evelyn Braxton.
Braxton shared an old photo of the sisters and their mother together on Wednesday. “Family is everything! Especially sisters!” Braxton wrote. Thousands of her Instagram followers commented, including Traci, who posted six heart emojis. Meanwhile, fans told Braxton they were praying for Tamar and their family. “Praying for you and your family. Hope you are all doing okay. Love you!” one fan wrote.
Tamar was rushed to the hospital on July 16 after her boyfriend David Adefeso found her “unresponsive” at her downtown Los Angeles home. Before the alleged suicide attempt, Tamar publicly complained about how WE tv portrayed her and her family, even adding “Slave” to her Twitter name. In a letter Tamar wrote to WE tv executives weeks before she was hospitalized, she accused executives of making her “suicidal” and ruining her family. She said the family was in “disarray” when WE tv reached out to employees for responses to the protests sparked by George Floyd’s death.
“We fight with each other, we betray each other, and now we’re physically assaulting each other — all happening because your show has chosen to show the absolute worst side of a strong, independent and successful African American family; a show that I created to showcase a strong Black Family as a beacon of hope for all the young black girls and boys out there; instead you coached and cajoled us into finding the worst in each other,” Tamar wrote to WE tv, reports Page Six. She also compared the network to “cruel white slave masters who once chained our forefathers, and the oppressive police forces that now terrorize our communities.”
On Thursday, Tamar said she felt “betrayed, taken advantage of, overworked, and underpaid” by WE tv for the past 11 years. She called for the creation of a union to protected reality television stars and accused WE tv of manipulating the show to portray her as a person she is not. “Who I was, begun to mean little to nothing, because it would only be how I was portrayed on television that would matter,” she wrote. “It was witnessing the slow death of the woman I became, that discouraged my will to fight. I felt like I was no longer living, I was existing for the purpose of a corporations gain and ratings, and that killed me.”
WE tv responded by finally letting Tamar out of her contract on Friday. She will still appear in episodes of Braxton Family Values she has already filmed. Her own series, Get Ya Life!, will still air in September.
If you or someone you know are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741-741.