Rihanna says assault “a wake-up call that had to happen”

Rihanna says her assault by Chris Brown was “a wake-up call that had to happen”.

The singer was punched, bitten and choked by her on/off boyfriend Chris in his rented car in February, just before she was due to perform at the Grammy Awards. Although she was devastated by the attack, Rihanna now believes it has helped her make some positive changes in her life.

“A whole thing happened overnight this year,” she explained to Britain’s The Guardian newspaper. “The night before the biggest performance of my career, as well as 10 days before I became 21. It was a turning point. It was the end of an incredible year, an incredible album with Good Girl Gone Bad, the beginning of a new era, and it just felt like it was a wake-up call for me, and it had to happen. As bad and as terrible as it was, there's so much great that came out of that situation.”

Rihanna recently gave a US TV interview in which she admitted she was “embarrassed” to have fallen in love with Chris, and that she gave him a second chance after the assault. She now hopes speaking about the incident will help other young women and men in the same situation.

Seemingly referring to Chris, she explained: “Even for him, like, he knows now that he's never going to do that again. And now, young girls also, they learn from it, and I really hope young men can learn from it. Even more than the girls, the men really need to learn from it. Because everyone's focusing on the women, but the problem isn't the women.”

Rihanna is ready to move on with her life and forget about the assault. She knows people will always turn to her for comments about abusive relationships, but is keen not to have “that stamp going across my head as a victim of domestic violence”.

She feels the incident has allowed fans into her private life, something which she insists can only be a good thing. “Before, young girls would look at me, and they thought my life was perfect, but now they realise that it's not. Nobody's perfect. I'm living the same human life that they are, just with a more public career – and when they realise that I do go through dumb stuff like that – all of a sudden that makes me human for them. So now I feel really strong, but I also feel very open."

Chris was sentenced to five years probation, six months community labour, 52 weeks of domestic violence counselling classes and banned from contacting Rihanna for five years for the assault.