How Ol’ Dirty Bastard saved a young girl’s life
One day in 1998, Wu-Tang legend Ol’ Dirty Bastard was in Brooklyn when he saw that something truly awful had happened. A little girl had just been hit by a car—and now she was stuck underneath the vehicle. But ODB didn’t just stand there watching. He acted.
The little girl, four-year-old Maati, had been walking along the street when, as her mother Maxine Lovell would later explain in the 2024 documentary Ol’ Dirty Bastard: A Tale of Two Dirtys, “out of nowhere” a car appeared and struck her down. She was then left trapped beneath the vehicle’s body.
“Maati was nowhere,” Lovell recalled of the harrowing event. “I couldn’t find her. And I kept saying, ‘Where’s my daughter? Where’s my daughter? Where’s my daughter?’ And everybody said, ‘Under the car.’ When I bent down all I saw was her. And she wasn’t crying; she wasn’t screaming. But when she saw me, then she screamed.”
Maati, an adult now, remembers “bits and pieces” about what happened to her, noting, “I remember the heat.”
Shortly after the incident occurred, the late rapper appeared on The Howard Stern Show, where he gave his account of what had happened. He hadn’t actually seen the girl get hit, but he saw that something serious was going on. “I just stopped my car in the middle of the street and I ran towards the car,” he explained. “Like what’s goin’ on? Everybody’s talkin’ so fast and movin’ so fast, it’s like [a] spontaneous reaction.”
When it became clear that a little girl was trapped beneath this vehicle, ODB sought to get her out. He didn’t act alone, but it’s said that he took on a leading role, helping to organise the group of people that was present and trying to help. Together they all managed to lift the car and free the girl.
“Some brothers came from out of nowhere,” Lovell recalled. “They lifted the car. Someone slid [Maati] from underneath. She didn’t cry and she didn’t scream. She didn’t know what had happened to her. But when she saw my face, she started wailing.”
Young Maati was left with burns following the incident, and she was transported to the hospital. Thankfully she pulled through, and, throughout her stay, she had a regular visitor to keep her company.
“[ODB] kept checking [on us]—he didn’t just leave it like that,” Lovell noted. “And I told him, ‘Anytime you need to talk, call me.’ So he would call me and tell me things that were in his head. And he was glad that he was there [when Maati needed help]. I think he was trying to prove that he was a good guy, and I said, ‘I agree with that. You definitely helped my child.’”
ODB, around this period in his life, was experiencing legal issues and increasing media scrutiny in response to his erratic behaviour. Problems in his personal life were mounting, and, as it would turn out, it was all leading up to his untimely death in 2004. But his behaviour on the day of Maati’s accident, if nothing else, demonstrates there was another side to ODB away from all the noise in the media. As Maati herself put it, 20 years after his death, “It shows what type of person he is.”