The ‘half’ of Milli Vanilli demands justice with a film about the biggest scandal in music: “They deceived us”

“It was about celebrating the music, celebrating Rob Pilatos (who died of an overdose in 1998) and that time together and also telling the story so that people would know what we felt, because people still think that we were the ones who organized it all”. This is how he presented Fab Morvan the new documentary film with which he tries to do justice in a world that sentenced them without any trial. The one with the duo Milli Vanilli It is one of the great stories of music: after selling millions of copies and winning a Grammy, it was discovered that they did not sing their songs. Despised and expelled from the industry, now one of them, the only one alive, is willing to clean up his image and uncover the whole truth about what happened.

The film hits theaters on March 27. Its titled Girl You Know It’s True, like the song that made them known at the end of the 90s and of which 7 million copies were sold. Morvan acknowledges his part of responsibility in the scandal but details that neither the idea was his nor the intention to take the lie so far: “Yes, we made a mistake, but they also deceived us and we fell into a trap by signing a contract without a lawyer, without a representative, without anyone to protect us. We were two young people and they took advantage of us to take away the possibility of singing on an album”he assures.

According to their version, they were trapped by a contract with Frank Fariancomposer and producer of Milli Vanilli songs, the same creator of the “hits” of Boney M. It was he who suggested that they be the image of a song for which, in principle, they were only going to dance. Then they added a playback. The success was so resounding that after one song came another. Farian refused to stop and they didn’t know how to stop either: “We were seduced by that lifestyle. Rob was adopted and my parents had divorced, so when we suddenly got all that love from the fans, it became addictive,” explains Morvan . However, after receiving the Grammy for Best New Artist, conscience knocked on his door. They began to feel remorse and gave their producer an ultimatum: either they sang their own songs or they left the label. “Our dream was to become singers and authors and we felt guilty day after day”says Morvan.

From their initial success in Germany they jumped to the US and undertook a tour, always in playback, while he began recording his own songs with a different record label. Everything was going well until at one of the concerts, in Connecticut, the tape that played the music broke down and went into a loop, which sparked rumors. At this moment Farian, who had already squeezed them to exhaustion under draconian conditions, took revenge and ‘sold’ them in front of the entire music industry: “Frank must have heard that we were recording an album with another label when he went to New York to declare that we were not the ones singing. From that moment on, no one wanted to even touch us”Morvan recalls.

Copies of their music disappeared from the market and the Grammy was withdrawn. They recorded an album with their voices under the name Rob & Fab, but without any impact, and in 1998, when he was considering returning again with Farian, Pilatos was found dead from an overdose of pills and alcohol. Now, Morvan is determined to pay tribute to his memory and to that of the kids who one day wanted to take on the world: “Sometimes life forces you to be humble. I understood that it was the process I had to go through,” he says. . Converted into a French teacher and dancer, the artist assures that things have changed a lot in recent years: “Today there would not have been the same scandal, with AI, autotune…”, he emphasizes. “People constantly make mistakes in private, the problem was that we did it in front of everyone,” says the artist, who claims to have made peace with the world and with its history. “In order to move forward, I have forgiven myself and also Frank Farian.” Of the producer, who died last January, he says: “He was passionate about what he did, but in the equation of fulfilling his dream he hurt some people. As a musician he was a genius; as a human being, perhaps there was work to do, but It’s not my place to judge.”