Unbreakable: My Story, My Way (22 page)

Then, in the first days of October, while I was enjoying the success of that album, my fears came true. The sex tape was posted on the Internet by an anonymous source, and it spread like wildfire. Within hours I felt as if the entire world had seen it. The media attention was huge and immediate. Telemundo and Univision talked about it constantly.

Many people thought I myself had leaked the tape for publicity, which couldn’t be further from the truth. That was the last kind of publicity I wanted. I was mortified and pissed beyond belief. And if I was going to intentionally leak a sex tape, I would have made sure the lighting was better. I was getting phone calls and e-mails asking if it was really me in the video and whether I wanted to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to crawl into a cave and disappear,
but I couldn’t. That same month I found out I was nominated for a Latin Grammy for Best Ranchero Album for
La Diva en Vivo
. My fellow nominees were Vicente Fernández, Pepe Aguilar, Pedro Fernández, and Los Temerarios. I was so proud to have my name listed beside theirs. The producers of the Latin Grammys asked me to perform on the show on November 13 with my brother Lupe. It was the first time we sang together at such a prestigious event. I was proud to stand beside my brother on that stage with our whole family in the audience. I didn’t win the Grammy that year, as suspected. When you are nominated in the same category as Vicente Fernández, you pretty much know what’s going to happen.

Unfortunately, despite the Grammy nomination and the hit album, people were still more interested in the fucking sex tape. I decided to turn the embarrassment into something positive. I wrote “Dama Divina,” which is an anthem for women to be proud of their bodies and their sexuality even if they do not look like a model or an actress. The guy in the video was twenty years younger than me. He was not Runner Boy. Not even close. When I crossed paths with him a few months later, I pounced on him and beat his ass. I bit him, busted his lip, and gave him a black eye before someone pulled me off him.

On December 7, 2008, I was scheduled to go back to Mazatlán, Mexico, to perform at a
palenque
. I was nervous because this was the city where the sex tape was filmed, and it was still all over the news there. I was nervous that the fans wouldn’t accept me and would judge me for it. I decided I would address the issue as soon as I got onstage to get it out of the way.

“I was afraid to come to Mazatlán,” I told the crowd. “Not because of what has been happening, but because one of the hardest parts of my life began here. That video that caused me so many tears.”

The crowd started to cheer my name over and over. At that moment the embarrassment melted away. I felt so loved and so relieved.

Halfway through the concert my manager, Gabo, told me, “Esteban Loaiza is here and he wants to meet you.” In Mazatlán and many parts of Mexico, Esteban Loaiza is an idol because he represented the country through baseball. He was a pitcher for more than twenty years in the big leagues, playing for several teams including the Chicago White Sox and the LA Dodgers. At the time, he was playing in Mexico. I invited him to come up on the stage. When he did, the fans started chanting,
“Beso! Beso!”

For the sake of putting on a good show (and because he was handsome), I played along. “Can you believe it,
mijo
? These people want you to make me a baby,” I told him.

He said with a smile, “Let’s go.” As he was walking off the stage, I grabbed his ass.

After the concert he came backstage to talk to me. By this point in my career, a lot of men were afraid to approach me, but Esteban was fearless. I also knew that he could get any girl he wanted in Mexico, and I wasn’t about to kiss his feet. If he was interested, I was going to make him work a little.

He said, “Let me take you out to eat.”

“I’m not hungry,” I told him.

“A drink?”

“No, I’m not thirsty.”

“Let me show you my town then.”

“I’ve seen this town.”

“Well, do you breathe? What about a walk for some air?”

I liked that he wasn’t giving up, so I agreed. It was only the third after-party I had attended in my entire career. We went for a walk on the beach and then we went back to his house, where his buddies were all drinking. I had hurt my knee, so I took a painkiller and fell
asleep in his room as he and his friends partied downstairs. I never even kissed the guy. The next night I caught my flight back home, but we kept in touch. We spoke every night until two or three in the morning. He never once mentioned the sex tape. He never mentioned the incident with the fan when I got arrested or any of the other media speculation about me. But I was sure he had heard of it, so I wanted to get it out in the open. So one day over the phone I decided to bring it up.

“You know what they say about me, right?” I asked him.

“Yes, but that is not who I see. I see the hardworking woman who fights for her kids.”

The first time he came to pick me up at my house for a date, my children were all skeptical of him. They were skeptical of any man who tried to date me. He took me to dinner, and as we sat down at the restaurant, I got a text from my youngest son, Johnny, saying, “Do you know that Esteban has a criminal record?”

“What are you talking about?” I texted back.

Johnny wrote, “I googled him and it says he was arrested for a DUI in 2006. Are you sure you want to date this guy?”

I knew this was Johnny’s way of telling me, “I’m looking out for you, Mom. I’ve got your back.”

I showed Esteban the text. “Yes, it’s true,” he said, and explained that he’d had a few drinks after a game and he got stopped on the freeway for speeding. He said the experience changed him and he realized how stupid it was. We talked more about our careers and our backgrounds. We both came from humble beginnings and were close to our families. It was your typical first date “getting to know you” conversation.

When I got home, Chiquis and Jacqie were waiting up to hear how it went.

“So?” Chiquis asked. “Tell me everything.”

“He was nice,” I replied. “It was nice.”

“But you’re not that into him?” she asked.

“I didn’t say that.”

Jacqie, who is not one to hide her true feelings, said, “You know, Mom, he seems like a cock.”

While it is true that I didn’t fall head over heels for him right away, he was sweet, handsome, and easy to be around. Soon enough that combination won me over. I realized that everything about this love was different from the love I had with Fernando. It’s true, there wasn’t the same passion and fire. But there were also no raging fights, no phone calls at four in the morning, no dramas. I told my family, “Fernie was a passionate love. But this is a mature love.” And a mature love is what I needed at that point in my life. Esteban and I understood each other in a lot of ways. He had his own fame and understood the good, the bad, and the constant demands that come with it. I was still in touch with Fernando here and there, and I would get updates on him through his mother. Though I still cared for him, I knew that he would never be able to provide me the stability that Esteban could.

My family grew to love and appreciate Esteban for the way he treated me. He took care of my every need. He was always asking, “Are you hungry? Do you need anything? What can I do for you?” He was the man I had dreamed of—this was Runner Boy. He had his own money. He’d had a successful career. He took care of himself. And he treated me like a queen and my kids like princes and princesses.

In January of 2009 the news of our relationship went public. That same month I bought a home in Encino, California. I was tired of driving from Corona to LA all the time. I needed to be closer to where the action was, but I couldn’t bring myself to sell my home in Corona. It wasn’t smart financially, but I held on to it and continued to pay the
bills though nobody was living in it. That was my first dream home. For me it represented so much. It represented that I was making good on my promises to my children, that I was proving Trino wrong, and that a poor little Mexican girl from Long Beach who once lived in a back garage could rise up and buy a seven-thousand-square-foot home.

This new home was even bigger at almost ten thousand square feet, with views of Los Angeles and the valley as far as the eye could see. I remember walking through that house the first night and asking myself, “How can it be that I once couldn’t pay the water bill on my little two-bedroom in Compton, and now I own a home with eleven bathrooms?” Not only that, I had finally found a man who treated me right, who wasn’t jealous or possessive, who had his own money and didn’t need anything from me but love and loyalty. And that’s all I needed back from him. Though we had only been together a few months, I had never felt so secure in my personal life.

And then, in May of that same year, Esteban and I broke up.

I caught him in a white lie and I ended it right then and there. For the few months that we had been together, he had done this multiple times, and it pissed me off. He would lie about the stupidest shit. I would always call him on it, but he continued to do it. I’d had enough of being lied to by men, and I wasn’t going to go through it again.

That same month my brother Juan was in the final rounds of a singing-contest show in Mexico called
El Gran Desafío de Estrellas
. He asked me to sing a song with him on one of the shows, and of course I said yes. I could never say no to Juan. The show taped every Sunday in Mexico City. That weekend I had shows in the cities of Hermosillo and Obregón and in Jalisco. After my last performance on Saturday night I flew to Mexico City to sing with my brother the following day. The show was broadcast on Azteca, the second-biggest network in
Mexico. The biggest network, Televisa, sent me an e-mail saying that if I went on
El Gran Desafío de Estrellas
, they would ban me from their network.

When I told Juan, he said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s not worth it.”

I said, “You’re my brother and I don’t give a fuck.”

Less than fifteen minutes after we sang, I received an e-mail saying that I was officially banned from Televisa.

The next morning I went to the Mexico City airport to fly back to LA. I had the cash on me from the concert on Saturday night—a little over $50,000. When they searched my bag and found it, they asked me why I didn’t declare it.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know I had to,” I explained. “Let me do it now.”

“You can’t,” they told me before they arrested and detained me.

I had to pay an $8,000 fine and then they released me. By the time I made it to LA, the news was everywhere. The first network to cover it, of course, was Televisa, despite their having said they would never report any news on me ever again. By this point in my career I understood how the media played the game, and I wasn’t going to be a part of it as long as I could help it.

Around that same time, Graciela Beltrán, during an appearance on
El Gordo y la Flaca
, said how I was always jealous of her because she was the pretty one. Most artists knew that when someone said something like that about me, I wasn’t going to back down and then they’d be able to say, “There goes Jenni Rivera fighting again.” But this time it was different. When Graciela started talking shit about me, it clicked: they were using me to get publicity and ratings. So I refused to respond.

Six months later Graciela said something again. I was so tired of the bitch, but I refused to give her publicity by fighting with her in the media. Instead, I wrote a song called “Ovarios.” I talked shit about
her in the song lyrics instead of on any show. “Yeah, you may be the queen,” I sang, “but it’s in an abandoned town.” It took me many years to figure out what the rappers had taught me way back in my high school days: the best way to settle your shit is through a song. That way you win the feud and you get the royalties.

21

Letting Go

Cómo sufrió por ella

que hasta en su muerte la fue llamando.

(
How he suffered for her

and even when he was dying, he was calling to her.
)

—from “Cucurrucucu Paloma”

_{On July 1, 2009,}
my sister and I were going to celebrate our birthdays together as we did every year. Except this time it would be on a three-story yacht in Long Beach. We had planned for a DJ and Los Herederos de Nuevo León to play that night. A few hundred people were invited. The press wanted to cover the event. Everything had been set since the beginning of June. We were all looking forward to it, but I put all plans on hold when we were informed that my ex-husband Juan had fallen ill in his cell at California City Correctional Center, where he was serving the second year of his ten-year sentence for drug trafficking. He was transferred to Lancaster’s Antelope Valley Hospital. I had expected him to get better, but as the
days dragged on, it didn’t seem as if it was going to happen. He had pneumonia and was suffering from complications due to an infection. I opted to cancel the big party and have a small dinner instead. My sister and I invited a few friends to my home in Encino for a quiet birthday celebration. I was too worried about Juan’s condition to even think about celebrating my birthday. Juan was the father of my two youngest children, and they were both so close to him. I couldn’t stand the thought of Johnny and Jenicka losing their father at seven and eleven years old. And though Juan and I battled from 2003 to 2007 over our divorce, we had long since put that behind us and became good friends once again. When he was incarcerated in 2007, I made a point to take my children to see him often, and sometimes I would even go alone. Juan and I could always talk through our shit with each other, and as we grew close once more, I considered him one of my best friends.