The Bin Laden I (Was Forced to) Groove With

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Turns out bin Laden hasn’t always been the ascetic figure we’ve come to know. For a while in the 1990s, he appears to have gone through a rather unpleasant 70’s-swinger phase.

The latest Harper’s Magazine has an excerpt from the autobiography of novelist Kola Boof, onetime sex slave of the al Qaeda leader. She’s the same woman quoted by the London Daily Mail that we noted earlier.

So what made bin Laden’s disco ball spin? Smokin’ some weed, listenin’ to some Van Halen or the B-52’s, checkin’ out the booty, and talkin’ government conspiracies, according to Boof. “To this day I hear the song ‘Rock Lobster’ in my sleep,” Boof wrote.

The man could get going on his crazy government theories, too! “He said the U.S. government was made up of ‘fanatical crusaders’ and that he’d once been a mind reader for the U.S. government and trained secret agents for the CIA,” Boof recalled.

He loved the badonkadonks: “Everywhere I went, his eyes followed my buttocks,” Boof wrote. “His lust was thick.” But he still found grounds for criticism. “Your ass is too big, show me the front,” he once told her.

Despite all this, his Whitney Houston obsession stayed foremost in his mind:

He explained to me that to possess Whitney he would be willing to break his color rule and make her one of his wives. I tried to hide my outrage at his racist remarks, but it would come to pass that for the entire six months that I would be trapped in his palm, Whitney Houston’s was the one name that would be mentioned constantly.

“Anyway,” Boof wrote, “it would later come to the point where I was sick of hearing Whitney Houston’s name.”

Update: Harper’s has posted the excerpt here.

Latest Muckraker
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: