How many kids has Dr Dre had since 1981?
Dr Dre has served as a hip-hop mentor to so many younger rappers through the years, be it Snoop Dogg, Eminem or Kendrick Lamar. But the man is also a father to a lot of children of his own.
The pioneering producer has a very large family, having fathered ten kids through the decades. His first, Curtis, was born in 1981, a result of Dre’s relationship with Cassandra Joy Green. Dre and Cassandra were only teenagers at the time, and their youthful relationship soon broke down.
Cassandra ended up raising Curtis without Dre, who didn’t meet his firstborn for the first two decades of his life. Curtis didn’t even know who his biological father was until the age of 12, but he learned about it during an argument with his stepfather, who’d started going out with Cassandra not long after her breakup with Dre.
In 2015, Curtis spoke with the website NextShark about how the bombshell was dropped. During a tense exchange, Curtis’ stepfather ended up blurting out at the 12-year-old, “N*gga, I ain’t your dad! You wanna know who your real daddy is? Your real daddy is Dr Dre.”
This was quite the shock to Curtis, who, like so many other Compton kids his age, idolised NWA. He wanted to meet Dre, but his stepfather had a problem with that. Eventually, his stepdad and mother broke up, which meant he was finally able to reach out to Dre. It took many more years, but eventually, when Curtis was 20, a meeting finally happened.
“It was like looking in the mirror, seeing him face to face,” Curtis recalled of the encounter. “We met at Skybar in Hollywood for the first time. It’s really indescribable. The best way to describe it is meeting your favourite basketball player or football player.”
After Curtis was born, Dre started a relationship with a woman called Lisa Johnson, who gave birth to his daughter, LaTanya, in 1983. Two more girls were produced by this relationship, with LaToya and Ashley arriving in 1984 and 1985, respectively, before Dre and Lisa split. That, perhaps, may have had something to do with the fact that another daughter, Tyra, was born in 1984. Her mother was LaVetta Washington.
In 1988, a boy was born, Andre Jr, whose mother was Jenita Porter. Andre Jr would later die young, aged just 20, because of an overdose. Dre’s relationship with R&B singer Michel’le produced a son, Marcel, in 1991, while Dre raised two more boys through his relationship with Nicole Young. One, Tyler, wasn’t his biological son, as his father was one of Nicole’s exes, but Truice, born in 1997, was Dre’s kid.
Dre and Nicole also had a daughter called Truly, who was born in 2001 – a significant year in Dre’s musical mythology. Truly is Dre’s youngest, the last member of his large family.