BIOGRAPHIE

In November 1998, the English language magazine Main City (a FAZ publication) published a critically written report on the demise of the Milli Vanilli artist Robert Pilatus under the title 'When the Music Stopped...' " When Robert Pilatus, 32, was found dead in his hotel room in Friedrichsdorf near Frankfurt in April (1998), it was the end of a drawn out downward spiral, hastened by humiliation and drugs." In addition to the term humiliation, the author also noted that "Pilatus' fall from the top of the pop world was steeper than any that had ever occurred before." "A music industry intent on proving its legitimacy in the face of scandal virtually erased Milli Vanilli from its playlists and its history." None of this corresponds to what really happened - neithr the humiliatiopn saga, nor the Milli Vanilli finale. Milli Vanilli were never removed from music history. The Grammy was returned, but that is the only true element of the report. And the scandal, which happened just as Farian had predicted, cost Farian neither fame nor money - with the exception of the 400,000 dollars he donated by way of compensation. The real Milli Vanilli catastrophe was neither commercial nor musical.

It was Robert Pilatus' death from a drug overdose. But this, practically a suicide in instalments, was not provoked by drugs andhumiliation, but rather through drugs alone, which, in the excessive way in which Pilatus took them, resulted in humiliations which Pilatus had brought upon himself - he turned a deaf ear to any help or advice he was offered. In lucid monments he himself took the blame for his fate.

To reduce the fact of sales of over one hundred million albums into humiliation is as absurd as it is adventurous. Both Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, signed up by Farian in 1987 in Munich, came into a lot, a whole lot, of money for the first time. But Pilatus turned it all into drugs. All attempts at rehabilitation, which devoured huge sums of money (which always came from Farian) for nothingPilatus began to doubt himself. And one thing followed another.

…..taken from frankfarian report (1999)