Gloria Trevi
Gloria Trevi (born Gloria de los Angeles Treviño Ruiz, February 15, 1970) is a Mexican pop rock singer whose life has been as controversial as her career as a singer has been successful. Her scandals and controversies have made some people nickname her The Madonna of Mexico.
Trevi was born in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, to a reportedly violent and impoverished home. She struggled to survive when she was little, as the lack of food and money in her house being a challenge. She wanted to become an entertainer since she was little, and she began to learn poetry when she was five, and then she started taking ballet and piano lessons. Trevi's parents divorced when she was ten. There have been allegations that her mother mistreated her and tried to discourage her from being a singer. The veracity of those rumors, however, are not clear. The fact her mother has come out on international television, pleading for Trevi to change her wild ways, makes those rumors look even more like just rumors.
Gloria left her home city at the age of twelve, arriving at Mexico City, where she met the also controversial manager Sergio Andrade, alleged child molestor and slave master. Before meeting Andrade, she worked singing and dancing on the streets for spare change, as well as teaching aerobics and serving tacos at a taco stand. In 1985, she was a member of a short-lived girl group named Boquitas Pintadas (Little Colored Mouths).
With Andrade's help, Trevi released her first album in 1989, Y Que Hago Aqui? (And What Am I Doing Here?). The album scored an instant number one hit for her, Dr. Psiquiatra (Dr. Psychiatrist), and four other songs from that album went up the charts too. She soon became known as a challenger to the machismo ideas of many of Mexico's men, breaking social standards and taking a feminist stand point on many of her songs, while exploring sexuality in a way that not many female Mexican entertainers had done before her. Trevi would even bring male members of her audience to the stage and undress them. Despite the way she carried herself on stage, she was also able to become very popular among Mexican and Latin American children. At that point of her career, it became common for many little girls and teenaged females to dress like Gloria's concert attire.
Trevi, however, also carried herself to the public as a girl who could break down and cry at any minute and for anything she heard about. A lot of times, during her television interviews, the talk show host would mention her childhood and she'd go from acting happy to spilling her tears from one minute to the other.
She followed up her first record, with the 1991 album Angel De La Guardia (Guardian Angel), which became even more successful than the first one, her song Pelo Suelto (Loose Hair) becoming her most widely known hit; it became number one all over Latin America and for the Latino population in the United States.
Trevi then filmed a movie, also named Pelo Suelto. In it, she participated with fellow wild living former world boxing champion Jorge Paez. The movie became a number one hit, and Gloria was invited to tour in many countries. In 1992, she began a tour all over the Caribbean and South America, which took her to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Venezuela and Chile. She also released her first calendar, which was considered by many of her fans and critics to be very suggestive and sexually oriented. Meanwhile, she kept talking in public about such things as teen sex, abortion, drugs, AIDS, prostitution and anything that came into her mind.
Her third album, Me Siento Tan Sola (I Feel so Lonely), was released in 1993, and it garnered her another hit, Zapatos Viejos (My Old Shoes). The album was taped in Los Angeles. Gloria released a new calendar, which was even more suggestive than the first one. Then, her second movie, also named like her song, Zapatos Viejos, was released.
Trevi became more reclusive after that. For years, all that was heard about her were rumors and speculation. But then, in 1995, Sergio Andrade's former wife published a book about how Andrade allegedly would pick up teenaged girls and lure them into a web of sex and slavery by promising to make them superstars. According to the book, named De La Gloria Al Infierno (From Glory to Hell), Trevi was also a willing participant of Andrade's scams, and she had fallen in love with her manager, supposedly participating in his manager's sexual orgies and slavery acts with the teenaged girls just to please him.
Around 1997, many of the girls that were allegedly abused escaped from Andrade and declared stories of horror and violence to television cameras. Andrade and Trevi flew out of Mexico without being captured, stopping in Spain and Chile before they were declared, along with a third accomplice named Mary Boquitas, as fugitives of the Mexican judicial system. Soon after, Karina Yapor, a girl from northern Mexico, gave birth to a baby boy she alleged to be Andrade's son. By this time, Trevi, Boquitas and Andrade were the talk of every Spanish tabloid television show in the United States, and most of Latin America. Trevi, Andrade and the rest of their 'troop' soon escaped to Argentina, where the remaining girls escaped and were soon flown to Mexico. But before Trevi, Andrade and Boquitas were caught, they escaped to Brazil, where they were able to live for a couple of years, until they were finally caught by Brazilian police and arrested. In Brazil, Trevi allegedly enjoyed walking around the neighborhood where she resided, eating at a local bakery every day. When they were caught, the news quickly spread to Spanish speaking people everywhere.
A legal battle ensued because Brazilian prosecutors wanted them charged there, but Mexican prosecutors claimed that the three prisoners belonged to them because they had begun their practices while still in Mexico. Trevi, Andrade and Boquitas were flown from their original jail to another facility because of overcrowding. Soon after, a tape where Trevi can be heard singing songs (allegedly to Andrade) on the plane ride became public. In the song, which didn't seem to be a written song but one she was making up, she talks of how she'd done everything for the love of a man.
In the new jail facility, Trevi became pregnant. She initially accused a jail guard of raping her, supposedly causing the pregnancy. But, after giving birth to a baby boy, she admitted the boy was Andrade's son. She was released under a Brazilian law that allows women who give birth while prisoners to live in a house with their children, but her new freedom was brief, because once again, Mexican authorities began to ask for her, so she had to be taken back to jail.
Brazil's authorities came to an agreement with Mexican authorities and, on December 21, 2002 they extradited Trevi, Andrade and Boquitas to Mexico so they can face charges there. Her baby ended up living with his grandmother, Trevi's mother.
There were allegations also that, while fugitive, Trevi supposedly gave birth to a baby girl of Andrade, and that they left the baby to die. However, no body or evidence were found, so they were not charged with homicide. (Trevi would later admit in a comic strip that she does not know of the whereabouts of this daughter.)
On November 27 of 2003, Andrade was jailed in the same facility as Trevi, but they were not allowed to get in contact there.
On February 24, 2004, Trevi was expecting to be set free by Mexico's justice system. She was denied freedom at the time. After she learned that she would not be allowed to go free, she began a hunger strike.
On September 21, 2004, Trevi was acquitted and set free by a Mexican court, citing a lack of evidence in the case. She had spent nearly five years incarcerated in Brazil and Mexico.
Trevi began a new tour in 2005 when she sang at a concert in Monterrey. The tour was cancelled when she arrived at Puerto Rico, however, because she tested positive in a pregnancy test, with the only leg of the tour to be carried on being a concert, alongside Olga Tanon and Ana Barbara, at [Disney World]] in Orlando, Florida. She decided to carry on with the Disney World concert, in part, because she took her small son with her to that Florida theme park.