More than 30 years after the Milli Vanilli cheating scandal became known, former superstar Fabrice “Fab” Morvan sees himself as a scapegoat. “We were thrown to the wolves. We were, so to speak, the scapegoats and everyone else shirked their responsibility,” said the 57-year-old in an interview with the German Press Agency.
“When the story came out, everyone kept their mouths shut – and just got on with it. They were able to pay their kids’ college tuition, their mortgages, and they climbed the corporate ladder because they were connected to a very, very successful project. But Rob and Fab? They were simply forgotten and people talked badly about them. They became the punch line, they were no longer respected.”
The childhood friends Morvan and Robert “Rob” Pilatus met in Munich and started out as club dancers in discos like the P1. As the pop duo Milli Vanilli, produced by Frank Farian, they became superstars in the late 1980s; their disco pop hit “Girl You Know It’s True” sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.
Rob Pilatus died in 1998
The two were stripped of their 1990 Grammy win after it was revealed that they never sang themselves but instead moved their lips to the voices of others. The band’s scandal is considered one of the biggest cheating scandals in music history.
To mark the band’s 35th founding anniversary, Sony is releasing a best-of album, and the film “Girl You Know It’s True” by director Simon Verhoeven is coming to cinemas in December – with Matthias Schweighöfer as Frank Farian.
Morvan now works as a singer and songwriter and has four children. His friend Rob only lived to be 33 years old. He died in 1998 and was buried in the Waldfriedhof in his hometown of Munich.
