Via LA Confidential:  Blige, 42, has been an indomitable force in the music business for more than two decades, ever since Sean “Diddy” Combs, her friend, mentor, and executive producer of her first album, took her under his professional wing. She has gone on to sell more than 50 million albums and is the only artist to have won Grammy Awards in four categories (R&B, Rap, Gospel, and Pop), having been nominated for the award 29 times, and winning nine.

She has also begun an acting career. She’s been in the requisite Tyler Perry movie and last fall completed the upcoming Lifetime Network film Betty and Coretta, about the widows of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., in which she stars as Dr. Betty Shabazz opposite Angela Bassett’s Coretta Scott King.

Married for the past nine years to Kendu Isaacs, Blige has come a long way from her troubled past. Born in the Bronx , the daughter of Thomas, a musician, and Cora, a nurse, she grew up in Yonkers, New York, where she attended the charismatic Pentecostal church.

It was a hardscrabble life. And yet she bears her emotional scars with dignity. After we were introduced, we curled up together on a sofa in the corner of the photo studio. As she sank into the cushions—giving the brim of her newsboy cap a jauntier tilt as she did so—we dug into just how hard-won such dignity has been for her. Blige, the artist, has always used “sampling” in her music; here’s a “sampling” of my conversation with Blige, the woman.

KEVIN SESSUMS: I can’t wait to see you channeling Betty Shabazz. She and Malcolm X had six daughters.
MARY J. BLIGE: Attallah, Qubilah, Ilyasah, Gamilah, Malikah, Malaak. There’s a lot of ’em.

KS: If they had had a seventh one they could have named her Synesthesia.
MJB: [Laughing] I have that condition, synesthesia. I see music in colors. That’s how my synesthesia plays out.

KS: I think a lot of Betty Shabazz’s empathetic—even wounded—dignity can be traced back to when she was the daughter of an unwed teenager herself back in Detroit. Can your empathy, your dignity, be traced back to your own wounded childhood?
MJB: I still have the child within me. She’s more around now than ever. She wasn’t around in the early days because I was pushing her back. I didn’t want anybody to hurt her.

KS: Somebody did hurt you. You were molested. I’ve written about my own molestation—though some people think those kinds of things should be kept to oneself.
MJB: Yes. That was very hard to deal with—my molestation—and sometimes I do go into that again. But I can’t do that so much anymore. That’s a prison.

KS: For so many of us your song “No More Drama” became a kind of key out of the prisons of our own pain—whether it was from abuse or molestation or drug addiction or alcoholism. You were preaching to us, Mary.
MJB: For me, it wasn’t preaching. For me, I was exorcizing demons. It’s extra hard for people like you and me because we want to be free and we speak about it.

KS: You’ve spoken openly about your addictions as well.
MJB: What I did was I chose to learn how to drink socially and it didn’t work. The test comes when you have to decide whether you’re drinking to be social or drinking to cover up something again. To cover up depression. To cover up guilt. Shame. Abandonment. All of that, man. Once I realized, “There you go again,” I had to stop. Whitney Houston’s death really affected me. Her death is another reason I stopped. I really do think I’m done. I looked at how that woman could not perform anymore.

M<ore @LAConfidential...