Tashera Simmons sat in a movie theater watching King Kong when her phone started buzzing. The call would change everything for the ex-wife of DMX and their four children.
“Earl’s on the floor,” the voice on the other end told her. Styles P’s wife was calling with news that would shatter the Simmons family. A detective cousin had found the rapper unresponsive at his White Plains home on April 2, 2021.
Tashera jumped up and ran into the theater hallway. Her heart dropped into her stomach as she processed the words.
“What? Are you sure that’s him?” she asked, hoping for different news.
The family rushed to White Plains Hospital, where crowds of people had already gathered. DMX’s uncle delivered the devastating update that doctors had worked on Earl for 30 minutes before getting his heart started again.
But the damage was done.
“They said that he’s brain dead and he was just there too long,” Tashera recalled in the new documentary series X vs. Earl: The Simmons Family Speaks.
The first episode dropped on February 5 on Antoinette Media’s YouTube channel.
Xavier, Sean, Tacoma, and Praise Simmons stood like soldiers beside their mother in the hospital waiting room. The children had lived through multiple scares with their father’s drug addiction over the years.
“I didn’t think it was going to be the end because in middle school, it was another death scare,” Xavier said. “I was like again like ‘you still doing this? We are we still having these scares?”
Tashera felt anger more than sadness as she watched people cry around her.
“I looked at all the people that were there crying and I was just like, ‘What the f### did y’all expect? Y’all watch this man kill himself every day?’” she said.
The ex-wife had known the rapper for 10 years before he became DMX. She watched his rise to fame and the beginning of his fall. Their last conversation six days before his death still weighs heavily on her mind.
“I was trying to talk to him about being a better father,” Tashera explained.
DMX took a deep breath and sipped from his bottle of henny before responding. “It’s not going to make sense to you, Tashera. My vessel is tired, but my words will live on forever.”
Those words now feel prophetic to the family. The documentary series aims to show the real Earl Simmons behind the DMX persona that the world knew.
The family believes the industry failed DMX by treating him as a money tool instead of getting him help for his addiction. Tashera thinks she may have been an enabler in her own way by trying to comfort him without realizing the harm.
“When you love someone and you don’t know what to do you know you try your best to try to comfort them and not realizing that it’s enabling them,” she said.
The Westchester County Medical Examiner ruled DMX’s death was caused by acute cocaine intoxication that triggered cardiac arrest. He was 50 years old when he passed at White Plains Hospital on April 9, 2021.
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