Dawn Robinson, a founding member of successful girl group En Vogue, has been living out of her car for years, and while she initially did it out of necessity during the pandemic, she’s now devoted to the lifestyle.
“You guys, for the past three, almost three years, I have been living in my car,” Robinson said in a video that she posted to social media on Tuesday. “I said it. Oh, my God, it’s out. I’ve been living in my car. Oh, my gosh.”
See the full video below.
She noted that, around 2020, she moved in with her parents, but the arrangement didn’t work out.
“That was wonderful until it wasn’t,” Robinson explained. “I love my mom, but she became very angry, and a lot of her anger she was taken out on me. And I was her target all the time, and I was like, ‘I can’t deal with this. Like I respect her too much.’ I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. And it hurt me, so I was just trying to figure it out, but I couldn’t.”
The singer slept in her car for about a month before accepting an invitation from a manager to stay with him in L.A., but he didn’t have room for her, as had been promised, so she wound up in a hotel he paid for. Her attempts to move into an apartment, which she calculated would have cost him less than a lengthy hotel stay, were thwarted. She recalled being continually stressed about whether he could pay the bill.
Robinson hit the road. “I told my assistant one day, ‘I have been researching car life. There’s a whole community of people that live in their cars, and a whole community of people that live in their RVs, and a whole community of people that live in vans, van life, car life, RV life, and I loved what I was seeing,” she recalled. “I just thought, ‘Wow, these people. I could do that, I could do this, I think. And I ended up in my car, and it’s been, like I said, three years.”
The Grammy-nominated artist was exhilarated, she said, the first night she saw the sunset from her car. While she has to be careful about safety, she’s happy with her life on the road overall.
Dawn Robinson, Maxine Jones, Terry Ellis, and Cindy Herron of music group En Vogue in 1993. Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty
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“That first night was scary, but then, as I got to know what to do in my car and how to do it, like, how to cover my windows and, you know, you don’t talk to certain people. You’re careful of telling people that you’re alone, as a woman especially, and I’m a celebrity,” Robinson said. “I don’t just divulge that to people. If you don’t know who I am, I’m not telling you that part.”
Now, she looks at it as “an adventure,” a period of separation from her family and friends, and a mission: She’s documenting her life in the hopes of creating a documentary. Robinson said she hopes to inspire others.
“This is not like, ‘Oh, my God! Poor Dawn, she’s living in her car, and it’s terrible. Oh, woe is me.’ It’s not that. It’s not. Like I said, I’m learning about who I am. I’m learning myself as a person, as a woman,” she explained. “If you would have said to me while I was En Vogue, ‘You’re going to be living in your car one day,’ I’d be like, ‘Huh? No, I’m always going to have an apartment. I can’t live in my car. How can I do that?'”
Robinson, Cindy Herron, Terry Ellis, and Maxine Jones formed En Vogue in 1989. They had a string of hits in the 1990s, including “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It),” “Free Your Mind,” “Don’t Let Go (Love),” and “Giving Him Something He Can Feel,” propelling them to sell millions of records and tour the world. Robinson left the group in 1997, but she rejoined them for short stints in the 2000s and 2010s.
