‘Everything good Bobby Brown’s ever had in his life, he’s destroyed’ – Whitneys BodyGuard Opens Up

There may have been no romantic involvement, but Roberts was the real-life recipient of a note under his hotel door saying: ‘I will always love you’ the title of the power ballad from the film that became more famous than the movie itself.
Whitney trusted him with her life. Yet unlike the character on screen, Roberts proved tragically unable to save her or her daughter.

Now, aghast at the latest twist of fate to assail Whitney’s family and her legacy, the bodyguard has finally decided to tell how one of the most glamorous women on the planet was brought low by a disastrous cocktail of alcohol, celebrity and hard drugs. And he is not slow to point the finger of blame.

In his first interview since he finally left Whitney’s household, he recalls how her toxic marriage to ‘bad boy’ rapper Bobby Brown eclipsed her talent and she began the descent into helpless addiction.

It was a world, he says, in which the infant Bobbi Kristina would wear £20,000 diamond earrings – while witnessing her parents consume paralysing quantities of drugs.

After Bobbi Kristina’s birth in 1993, Roberts worried she would have little choice but to follow the same path as her mother.

He takes no satisfaction from being proved right.

‘That girl had no chance from the start,’ he says. 

‘She was born into chaos. Her father was instrumental in her mother’s downfall.

‘Everyone is responsible for their own actions, but Whitney was vulnerable. She was obsessed with Bobby Brown and he subjected her to so much psychological abuse that she lost everything, including her dignity. 

'I watched Bobbi Kristina as a little girl, running around the corridors of hotels we were staying in, surrounded by the degenerates who were supposed to be looking after her, and I worried for her future. 

‘When I heard what had happened to Bobbi Kristina, I wasn’t surprised, but I was angry.

‘Everything good Bobby Brown’s ever had in his life, he’s destroyed – his career, Whitney, and now Bobbi Kristina. She’s another victim of his poisonous personality.’

On January 31, Bobbi Kristina was found in the same awful circumstances as her mother had been, lying face-down and unresponsive in the bath. Bobbi’s partner Nick Gordon is said to be devastated.

Roberts, now 62, retains his Welsh lilt and speaks in slow, measured tones. He has a fatherly air at odds with his toughness, although the latter is evident in the prominent scar on his head acquired while defending Houston during a fight between her brother, Michael, and a gang of racist thugs in Kentucky.

His association with Whitney started purely by chance. But within a short space of time he was not just protecting her, but keeping her whirlwind life and career intact.

He had been a police officer and then a sergeant in the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department of Scotland Yard. He saw action in Northern Ireland and was later trained as a sniper. He was also involved in the Iranian embassy siege in 1980 in London. In 1984 he started his own security and investigations consultancy. 

In February 1988, he was asked by the American embassy to look after Whitney Houston during a forthcoming visit to London. He’d never heard of her. Their first encounter was at Heathrow airport, where she was arriving on Concorde. She was surrounded by a huge entourage – including her friend and rumoured lesbian lover Robyn Crawford – and Roberts was introduced to her only briefly. 

However, a night out a few days later brought him to the attention of the American security team travelling with her. He recalls: ‘She went to Browns nightclub, and there was a scuffle as she left, with photographers swarming to take pictures of her. 

‘One guy was trying to climb into the Rolls-Royce to get to her, so I blocked him and his camera fell to the ground and smashed.

‘Because I’d done my job – with the benefit of local knowledge – the former FBI security guy who was looking after her hired me to continue providing security for the whole of her British tour, followed by her European tour, and then as director of security on a Far East tour.’ 

Roberts quickly found himself personally guarding Whitney outside her hotel door as she slept at night.

‘We developed a rapport and I liked her immensely,’ he says. ‘At that time, she was a very professional and articulate but slightly shy and unworldly woman.

‘She had a wonderful sense of humour. We had a lot of fun.’

Roberts believes that she had already experimented with drugs at this stage, although he saw no sign of them.

He was then asked to arrange the security for her 26th birthday party at her house in New Jersey.  

She attended on the arm of actor Eddie Murphy, but Roberts noticed a new male presence. ‘A bus pulled up at the house and three guys got off. 

One of them was wearing a turquoise and white floral shorts suit, black loafers and white socks.

‘I asked if I could help him and he said he was Bobby Brown and that he had an invitation to come to the party. Later in the evening, I saw him dancing with Whitney in a way they would call dancing but other people might describe as sexual assault. And that was it.’

Life for Roberts became a cycle of going on tour for three months, then returning home to London for two or three weeks.

‘It wasn’t a job, it was a vocation,’ he says. ‘It left no room in my life for anything else, including my wife at the time. I had to be there for Whitney, or Nippy, as her friends and family called her, whenever she needed me.

‘Once, she called for me because her false tooth had fallen down the sink in her hotel room in Hong Kong. I couldn’t retrieve it, so we had to take her to a dentist to get it fixed. I didn’t mind. We had a bond.

‘On tour, she’d push little notes under my hotel room door, messages saying thank you. Once, she wrote, “I will always love you”, years before the song came out. She was sweet, and I think she saw me as a sort of protective uncle figure.’

Officially, Houston and Brown’s romance did not begin until 1991, although Roberts says Brown had become a fixture long before that.

‘I could see the effect he was having on her. She became obsessed by where he was and what he was doing. She didn’t trust him, and the emotional stress manifested itself in her starting to lose her temper. She was unhappy; there wasn’t the same laughter there had been.’

From the start, their pairing was an unlikely one.

Whitney, already America’s sweetheart whose eponymously titled first album remains the bestselling debut by a female artist in music history, was the product of a show-business dynasty. 

Her mother was Cissy Houston, a singer, and her father John Houston, a powerful entertainment manager. Dionne Warwick was her cousin and Aretha Franklin her honorary aunt.

He recalls: ‘She said to me, “David, I think I’m going to marry Bobby.” I said, “Really, boss?” She said, “Yes. What do you think?”

‘I just didn’t know how to say to her, “Please God, no, don’t do it.” ’