Brandy Recalls Debilitating Survivor’s Guilt After 2006 Car Accident That Left One Woman Dead

“The Boy Is Mine” singer Brandy was involved in a horrific car crash in 2006 that took the life of Awatef Aboudihaj, and she opens up about the accident in her new memoir, Phases.

Brandy, 47, wrote that she was “focused” and her “mind was clear” right before the accident in the memoir released on Tuesday, March 31, per Us Weekly.

“It was just a drive, another day traveling the pale concrete veins of the 405. How many times had I coasted along this mundane stretch of freeway?” the “Missing You” singer explained. “But all familiarity was shattered on a chilly December morning in 2006. There had been no warning. No shiver down the spine. No flicker in the atmosphere hinting at what was to come.”

However, Brandy said she still “couldn’t see the danger in time.”

“I didn’t see the car ahead of me strike the vehicle in front, didn’t register the sudden chain reaction until my world was being split into two halves: before and after,” she continued.

While, at first, the I Still Know What You Did Last Summer star thought she had caused the accident, a bystander informed her that it wasn’t.

Brandy remembered giving a “paralyzed scream” that was followed by “deafening, impossible silence,” as well as Aboudihaj being pulled from the car.

Even though Aboudihaj was immediately rushed to the hospital, she succumbed to her injuries the next day.

“Guilt gripped my throat, squeezed harder and harder until breathing became a conscious effort,” she wrote, according to the publication. “It was an accident — a tragic convergence of circumstance and human error. But a woman had lost her life. And I had lived.”

What followed was debilitating survivor’s guilt that left the Grammy winner feeling as though she didn’t have “the right to continue living [her] life.”

“The woman who had died would never again feel sunshine on her face or hold her children close. Who was I to smile? To sing? To exist in a world where she no longer could?” Brandy recalled.

Brandy admitted that she had a tough time forgiving herself, but after several visits to a therapist, she said the grief “never left” but it eventually “softened.”

Aboudihaj was a mom of two, and her children filed a $50 million lawsuit against the singer. It was eventually settled out of court three years after the accident in 2009.