Unbreakable: My Story, My Way

by Jenni Rivera

  He stayed at his mother’s one-bedroom home for a couple of weeks, but he was constantly begging me to let him come back. He would tell me how much he missed me and the kids, but I couldn’t help but wonder if he really just missed the new lifestyle he had become accustomed to in Corona. The doubt continually ran through my mind.

  Eventually, I let him come back home, but from then on the roller coaster was on a serious downhill roll, making me sick to my stomach. He was going to give me a fucking ulcer.

  After all that happened, I just couldn’t be the devoted and understanding wife I had vowed to be when we got married. Fights and heated discussions came and went, and every time I would be less and less fazed by them. Once he came home with a beautiful mink coat as a form of apology, which would have been a nice gesture if he’d used his own money to buy it. Whenever I wore that mink, I would walk around saying, “Don’t you love the fur coat that Juan bought me with my money?”

  Oftentimes when we were on the road, we would have arguments before, after, or even during my performances. He didn’t care if I was going to go onstage; he would pick a fight with me right as I was walking up there, and I’d be all messed up. I wanted to give my best to my fans; after all, they had paid to see me and they didn’t care if I had problems or not. To give my best I had to be in the best emotional state, and he wasn’t allowing me to do that.

  Sometimes he would stay in the hotels and watch TV while I went out and made the dough. On occasion our confrontations would occur in the presence of my band members and road managers. One night after I had a performance in Utah, we had a major fight. The television in the room was thrown around and my performance clothes were dumped into the pool. Everyone found out. I felt horrible. I felt embarrassed. More and more people knew the type of life I was living.

  I was so angry that I left him in that hotel room in Utah. He had nothing. No transportation, no wallet, no driver’s license, no money. Nothing. He pissed me off so badly that I didn’t care if and how he made it home to California. I had to keep moving. I wasn’t about to let the difficulties in my relationship stop me from attaining the success I was working toward. My talent was for sure. My relationship with Juan was not. I would not be held back.

  On New Year’s Eve 2002 I was sitting with my brother Juan at my parents’ house. We were talking about what our resolutions would be for 2003.

  “This year,” I told my brother, “I will leave my husband for good. I will be happily divorced by the time we bring in 2004.”

  He looked and me and laughed. “You’re crazy, Chay. What kind of resolution is that? No wonder you guys can’t work it out.”

  I thought otherwise. I had tried long enough to make it work. I had gone through hell and back with this guy. He had cheated on me when I most needed him. I had forgiven him and had another child. I’d worked diligently on my career to achieve a better financial situation for my kids and family. How was I going to get any further in my career if I constantly had to fight the fights? But it wasn’t just about my career. It was also about my kids. In my anger with Juan I would get physically violent. I broke the house phone over his head when I found out he had been having phone conversations with yet another woman. I didn’t want my children to live with the constant racket of domestic violence in yet another home. And I didn’t want the two young children I had with Juan to even know what it was to live that way. They didn’t ask to be born. I brought them into the world and it was my responsibility that they lived happy, healthy lives. It was also up to me to give them a better life than the one we had lived before. I wanted the best for my children and I knew I wouldn’t be able to offer it to them if I didn’t free myself from the man who was holding me back.

  A few weeks after I made my resolution, somebody told me that Juan was partying at a club while I was performing in Mexico. Nice, huh? March came along, and instead of celebrating his birthday, we opted not to even speak to each other.

  April 4, 2003. I had no gigs lined up for the weekend, so Juan and I decided to go to the Banda el Recodo concert at the Gibson Amphitheatre. We had a good time with Renán Almendárez Coello (El Cucuy), members of his crew, and other staff of La Nueva 101.9. We sang and drank, and Juan and I spent some quality time together. It was the last time we would ever do so.

  The following morning I planned to go shopping for something to wear to his friend Mike’s wedding that night. Since Mike was a high school friend of his, I wanted to make sure Juan approved of what I wore. It always mattered to me how his friends and family members saw me. Before I left the house, I answered some e-mails and comments on my website and my forum on Univision.com. He hated it when I did that. He said I spent way too much time responding to my fans’ questions. I disagreed and would do it anyway, in part to get to know my fans better and in part just to be rebellious.

  When I left for the mall, he advised me to be back at 5:00 p.m., yet I didn’t get back until 5:30 p.m. I rushed into the house excitedly. Juan was in the bathroom and was pissed.

  “I thought I told you I wanted to leave at five p.m.”

  “I know, baby. I’m sorry. I couldn’t find anything I liked. I will be ready in a few minutes.”

  “If you hadn’t been wasting your time on the Internet chatting with your fans, we’d be leaving already,” he snapped back.

  “I said I would be ready fast, Juan. Don’t make me bring up shit that you’ve done. We both know you’re quite good at wasting time on doing things you shouldn’t do.”

  I was beginning to get irritated. We went back and forth until he threatened to go to the wedding without me.

  “I dare you,” I said. Five minutes later I watched him drive off as I looked out the bathroom window. I told myself I would give him thirty minutes to call or come back home, otherwise he would regret it. He called back thirty-five minutes later. I did not pick up. Five minutes too late was the final straw.

  I got dressed and went out with my friend Erika, whose birthday had been the day before. We went to celebrate at the Mirage, a nightclub in Artesia. We had a blast. It felt amazing to be free for at least one night. No Juan. No problems. No arguments. Just Erika and me, the hip-hop music, and a few shots of tequila. I was determined to be happy with or without my husband.

  In my heart I knew it was over. I knew exactly what I had to do to let him know that I was serious. I spent the night at Erika’s house in Anaheim. My kids were home with the nanny and I asked her to stay until Juan got home. I didn’t return home until ten the following morning. I had intentionally crossed that line.

  After that, we didn’t speak to each other for days. Not a word. Nor did I cook or attend to his needs. No sex. No nothing. I slept in the living room and he slept in the bed, as he usually did when we had fights. He tried to make up on various occasions, and when he realized that I wasn’t giving in, he tried to get to me through the kids. But I was done.

  On April 23, 2003, three days after Easter, I filed for divorce and had his sister, Maria, serve him with the divorce papers. No more messing around. For two months we lived like strangers in the same house. Though I was determined to go through with the divorce, it did hurt me to know that it was all coming to a crashing end. I loved him dearly but I didn’t like him anymore. The physical attraction was still there, but the mental attraction was long gone. He had hurt me too much and made too many stupid mistakes. I could not longer respect him or myself.

  Juan had been managing a lot of my career, and I decided that was the first thing I had to change. I had worked on and off with a booking manager named Gabriel Vazquez and his partner, Ariel. When I knew Juan and I were headed for divorce, I asked them to do my bookings full time. Then my attorney, Anthony Lopez, introduced me to a business manager named Pete Salgado. Anthony asked Pete to “see what you can do with her,” since nobody in the industry was taking me seriously and I was still considered a novelty act as Lupillo’s sister.

  Pete had just finished working with the popular group Los Tucanes de Tijuana and
he was a lot like me: no-nonsense, focused, and determined. We immediately bonded and started talking BIG. I asked him, “Why can’t I be like Mary J. Blige?” And he responded, “You can. You will.” It was so far-fetched at the time, but we were two dreamers who could see the same thing.

  I also had a publicist who had an in at the Ford Theatre in LA. I was intent on singing at a venue other than a nightclub, and so we used her connections to set me a date for my first true concert: Sunday, July 6, 2003. Four days after my thirty-fourth birthday.

  The Ford Theatre has one thousand seats. At the time the theater didn’t have access to Ticketmaster, so if fans wanted to buy tickets, they had to go to the box office in Hollywood. Shit, I thought, how the hell was I going to fill a thousand seats? No fans were going to want to make an extra trip to Hollywood just to buy tickets. We started to promote the show on blogs and on my Myspace page (we didn’t have the benefit of Facebook and Twitter back then), and fans would write in and say how many tickets they wanted. Then Rosie, Gladyz, my brothers, and Pete got into their cars and drove all over Southern California to hand-deliver the tickets. I was determined to make that concert a success for many reasons, the main one being it was the first event I ever coordinated without Juan. I had to prove that I could do this on my own.

  We worked to sell the tickets throughout the month of June. Chiquis, in her last year of high school, began hearing rumors that her stepdad had been seen with girls at the Hacienda, a nightclub in Norco. She would hear different stories each week about which strip club, nightclub, or leg contest he had been at on the previous weekend. She was so embarrassed that Juan would dare to act the fool at some place so close to home. Her friends, not knowing that Juan and I were getting a divorce, would tell her that her stepdad was cheating on her mom. She was devastated to know that her classmates thought her mother was being stepped out on.

  Sooner than I could imagine, the rumors started spreading well beyond the high school chatter. Juan and I had agreed not to let anyone know about our divorce because we saw how Lupillo’s divorce the year before had become messy and turned into a media fiasco. We didn’t want to go through the same thing. But Juan was acting like a crazy man and partying hard night after night. Since he had been in my music videos, people knew who he was, especially my fans. Whenever any of my fans would see him out on the town acting like a single man, they would call and write to the radio stations. Word on the street was “Jenni Rivera is getting played on. Jenni is getting done wrong.” I started to get calls from radio stations and disc jockeys telling me what my fans had reported.

  Knowing that a quiet divorce wasn’t going to happen, I began to feel stupid. The strong-woman image I had created for my fans and the industry was being tarnished. To maintain my dignity I had to speak up.

  On June 30, 2003, I had a radio interview with Thomas Rubio, a disc jockey at Que Buena 105.5. We were supposed to talk about my upcoming concert. A few weeks earlier, he had approached me about the situation with Juan. I had told him I wasn’t ready to speak about it. By now the story was much bigger and had started to get a bit out of hand. During the interview he asked me, “We’ve noticed that you always take your husband everywhere, but for a few months now, you haven’t. What’s going on?” I clarified that we had started divorce proceedings two months before, and that technically Juan was a free man. That’s how my parents found out.

  The following day I was invited to perform a track I had done with Akwid at their CD release party at the House of Blues. Quite a bit of media were there. As I went down the press line, none of the reporters questioned me about Juan or my interview with Thomas Rubio. But at the end of the line Magaly Ortiz, a reporter from Univision’s Primer Impacto, did ask if I was getting a divorce. She had heard the interview. I had no choice but to confirm.

  The next day, my birthday, the news went national. After the gossip had been discussed on Primer Impacto, all the other Spanish entertainment-news outlets picked up the story. Since it was a public record, Jessica Maldonado of El Gordo y la Flaca was able to get a copy of my petition for divorce from Riverside County Court. She also got her hands on the counterdivorce papers that Juan’s attorney had filed. Juan had moved out almost a month earlier, on June 6, but not before asking me for $10,000 to get an apartment. All I wanted was to get away from him, so I gave him the money. With that money he hired an attorney and asked him to file a demand for spousal support. Jessica made sure to report on it. It became a big deal in the Spanish media. In the Latin community, it’s unheard of that a woman should pay a man spousal support.

  My concert at the Ford was just four days after the news broke. We had sold eight hundred tickets by hand-delivering them. Hours before I was set to go onstage, the remaining two hundred tickets were all gone too. I couldn’t believe it. I had sold out my first concert.

  Of course my whole family was sitting front and center. I was wearing all of these beautiful Mexican mariachi dresses and I would change between sets. One of the dresses ripped in the back while I was singing, so I got through the song and then told everybody what had happened. I called my wardrobe stylist onto the stage to fix it, so out he came with a needle and thread and began sewing me up from the back as I joked around with him. “Is it my butt?” I asked him. “Be honest. Did I gain weight?” I have always believed that it is better to own the embarrassment than to hide from it. The crowd loved it. That night, I listened to a thousand people laugh with me, cheer for me, cry and sing along with me. Regardless of what was going on in my personal life, I felt that I was going to be okay.

  Meanwhile, Juan was questioned wherever he went. Many people looked down on him. How could he ask for support from a single mother of five? Was he not healthy enough or man enough to support himself? My family, my kids, and I felt the same way. The divorce proceedings began and were not pretty. I vowed that I would never forgive him for taking money from my children. My brothers wanted to kick his ass. Rosie egged his car. For once I was the rational Rivera, and instead of lashing out at him, I committed myself to my music more than ever. By this time I had learned that there is no better revenge than success and happiness (though that doesn’t mean I was going to stop my sister from egging his beloved truck). My career was on the rise, and though it pissed me off to have to hand over my hard-earned money to him, I was thankful that it wasn’t the other way around. Instead I sang him a song, “Las Mismas Costumbres,” with lyrics that told him just how I felt: “With affection I healed your wounds. And today I pay lawsuits in court.”

  13

  * * *

  La Gran Señora

  Tenemos que hablar de mujer a mujer

  hay que dejar unas cosas en claro.

  (We need to talk woman to woman

  we have some things to clear up.)

  —from “La Gran Señora”

  As I was going through my breakup with Juan, I was also dealing with my parents’ forty-two-year marriage falling apart and my beautiful sister going through a deep depression, which I felt responsible for.

  Rosie never dealt with her sexual abuse with intense counseling or therapy. Instead she started turning to drugs and alcohol, and for a while she became promiscuous. We would go out to clubs together and she would wear these short miniskirts. “Can that skirt get any shorter?” I’d ask her. She’d explain that it was for practical reasons: it made it easier for the pee to come out and the penis to come in. Rosie and I always joked around about sex, and we’d say to each other, “You’re such a whore.” The only proper response to that was “Well, you’re such a slut.” Coming from anyone else, those words would have started a brawl, but in our world they were terms of endearment. We both knew that it came from a place of love.

  I knew her substance abuse and promiscuity were a result of the sexual abuse, and I never judged her or shamed her, but it was hard to watch my baby sister dealing with her pain in this way. In 2002 she was seeing a guy and she got pregnant. The day that she told him, he left her. For the first two or th
ree months she would cry all day and all night. My brothers were ready to beat his ass. “That won’t help her,” I told them. “That’s not what she wants or needs.” I understood what it was like to be pregnant and on your own, just wishing that the father of your unborn child would come back to you to love you the way you needed to be loved.

  I called her ex and tried to get him to come around. “We don’t judge you,” I assured him. “We’re here to help you.” But he had made up his mind. He wasn’t coming back.

  Then, when Rosie was about six months pregnant, Mom dropped a bomb on the family that would change us forever. In December of 2002, after we attended the Premios de la Radio awards, she asked us all to a family meeting at her house. It was almost midnight and I was sitting there with my brothers, Rosie, and my mother, waiting for Dad to come inside. He was circling the block in his car, refusing to join us. All my brothers were asking what was going on and why Dad was acting so strange. Mom finally broke down and told us: he was cheating on her.

  It hit us all like a punch to the gut. “If you don’t believe me, I have evidence,” she said. “I hired a private investigator and there is video.” She said she had learned to do that from me. Though I was so sad, I was also proud of her for deciding she wasn’t going to take it anymore. We all told her we didn’t need to see any video, we believed her. One of us asked Mom, “Could you ever forgive him?”

  That’s when she told us the secret she had been keeping from us our whole lives. Dad had always cheated on her, from the time she was first pregnant at fifteen years old. It was the reason she was always afraid of getting pregnant. That’s when he would step out the most. It was also the reason she didn’t have any friends. Every time she brought another woman around, my dad would flirt with her and often end up sleeping with her. It was so hard to hear her tell us this. It was so hard to know that she had been keeping this inside for forty-two years. But the most difficult part to hear was how my mother had warned my father long ago that if he was going to sleep around, he should at least be careful not to get anyone else pregnant. That would absolutely crush her. But now he had done just that.