Stacey Dash has opened up about her own sobriety journey in a new video in which she breaks down after finding out that rap legend DMX suffered a cocaine-induced heart attack in April 2021.
In an emotional clip she shared Wednesday on TikTok, the the 55-year-old Clueless and Renaissance Man actress remembered the hitmaker through tears.
“I’m ashamed. I didn’t know DMX died. I didn’t know from a cocaine overdose,” she said, pausing several times to collect herself. “I am, today, six years and one month clean, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart that he lost to it. He lost. He lost to that demon…. Please, please don’t lose.”
In the video’s caption, she noted that she discovered the news after scrolling through the social media platform looking for one of DMX’s songs that previously “saved [her] many times,” though she didn’t specify which track it was.
While some users mocked the actress’ admission, others expressed words of support in the clip’s comments section.
“Addiction is one of the hardest things to overcome,” one user wrote to Dash. “You did and we love that you’re still here with us.”
Dash opened up about her struggle with substance abuse in a 2016 interview with PEOPLE, telling the publication that she was first offered the drug at the age of 16 after experiencing sexual abuse as a child when she was growing up in the South Bronx in New York.
“I couldn’t find happiness,” Dash said at the time. “It got to a point where I didn’t even want to live anymore. The voice in my head was saying, ‘There’s nothing here for you.'”
Though she rose to prominence as a popular fixture in ’90s pop culture thanks to her supporting role opposite Alicia Silverstone in the 1995 teen classic Clueless, Dash courted controversy in her later career for adopting conservative political views amid Hollywood’s liberal circles.
Imeh Akpanudosen/Getty Images; Shareif Ziyadat/FilmMagic Stacey Dash; DMX
She was an outspoken critic of Barack Obama and a supporter of Donald Trump, once called for an end to Black History Month, and praised Trump’s comments about the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. She later launched an unsuccessful bid as a Republican congressional candidate and joined Fox News as an on-air commentator.
“I’ve lived my life being angry. Which is what I was on Fox News,” she eventually told the Daily Mail in a March 2021 interview, referring to her 2014-2017 tenure there. “At that time in my life, it was who I was. And I realized in 2016 that anger is unsustainable, and it will destroy you. What people don’t know is I made a lot of mistakes because of that anger.”
Watch Dash’s TikTok video about DMX above.
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