Darlene Love sang the vocals on one of the most beloved Christmas songs ever recorded.
She just revealed the secret three-year love affair that ended the moment she had an abortion.
The man she almost married begged her not to go through with it.
Darlene Love and Bill Medley Hid an Interracial Romance Because of Jim Crow
The story surfaced this month in a new documentary, "Darlene Love: I Know Where I've Been," which premiered September 13 at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Darlene Love finally entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, decades after her voice powered other people's hits.
Long before that recognition, she loved a man the world was not supposed to know about.
Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers was someone she had known since the days of the TV show Shindig!
"I was shocked that they were White," Love said of Medley and his singing partner. "Not just me, everybody."
Both had already been married and divorced when Love's group, the Blossoms, opened for the Righteous Brothers on tour.
Neither one knew yet what they were about to become to each other.
The tour put them side by side for three years, long enough to fall in love and long enough to learn how to hide it.
They fell in love, and they hid it.
This was the Jim Crow South, and an interracial couple traveling together was not safe.
"We didn't want to make nobody unsafe when we were in the South," Love said.
Managers and agents pressured them to keep quiet too.
"We fought to be together … it was real close to getting married," Love said.
The Abortion Ended Their Romance and Sent Love Into a Deep Depression
Then Love got pregnant.
Medley begged her to keep the baby.
Love already had two children from her first marriage, and she said fear for them drove what happened next.
She made the decision Medley did not want, for reasons that had nothing to do with him.
"I went on my own with my people and had an abortion," she said.
"It wasn't nobody's fault … it wasn't my fault. It wasn't his fault, but that was the end, almost, of me and Bill," she said.
The relationship did not survive it.
Neither, for a while, did Love's peace of mind.
"There came a time while I was so into this depression after the loss of the baby," she said.
She said her faith eventually pulled her out of it.
Love calls what she lost "the baby," not a procedure, not a choice.
That is the word she reached for, decades later, with nothing left to gain by saying it.
The Same Hollywood Pressure That Hurt Garland Is Still Active Today
Love is not the first star whose love life got run through Hollywood's abortion machine.
Judy Garland's mother walked her into a shabby little office while Garland was married to composer David Rose, because MGM decided a baby would cost the studio money.
Jean Harlow's mother told her, at eighteen, that "a child could wait; her career could not."
Hollywood did not leave that machine in the past.
Nearly 600 men in entertainment, from J.J. Abrams to Jordan Peele, signed a letter after Roe v. Wade fell demanding studios pay for employees' abortion travel.
A record executive once told Sinéad O'Connor's doctor, "Your record company has spent one hundred thousand pounds recording your album. You owe it to them not to have this baby."
The names change decade to decade.
The demand does not: choose the career over the child.
Darlene Love's abortion did not save her relationship, and it did not spare her the depression that followed.
But it did not have the last word either.
She found her way back through her faith, and in 2011 the same industry that once needed her voice more than her name finally put it in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Sixty years later, she is not hiding this story in a quiet room anymore.
She is telling it in a documentary with her name right there in the title, called "Darlene Love: I Know Where I've Been."
Decades of silence did not heal her.
Telling the truth is what finally did.
Sources:
- Cassy Cooke, "R&B Star: Abortion Ended Secret Romance With Righteous Brothers Singer," LiveAction.org, September 2026.
- Live Action, "Nearly 600 Entertainment Industry Men Demand Studios Fund Abortion Travel: 'It Affects Us All,'" LiveAction.org.
- Students for Life of America, "Old Hollywood Horror: These Actresses Were Pressured or Forced Into Abortions," StudentsForLife.org, August 2, 2023.
