Janis Hunter’s story is harder and darker.
She was seventeen when they met—Marvin was thirty-three. The age gap, the power differential, the circumstances of their meeting (she came into his orbit through the recording sessions for *Let’s Get It On*, one of the most explicitly sexual albums in the R&B tradition) are all elements of a relationship that modern ethical sensibility would scrutinize with justifiable intensity.
Janis Hunter described a relationship that included love, abuse, jealousy, and dysfunction. She described Gaye pressuring her into sexual situations she was not comfortable with. She described violence and fear. She also described—publicly, in interviews she gave after his death—calling him “the love of my life.”
These two things are not contradictory. Victims of domestic abuse regularly describe their abusers with love. The love does not negate the harm, and the harm does not negate the love. Both are part of a relationship that was simultaneously genuine and damaging.
Janis Hunter Gaye died on December 3, 2022, at the age of 66.
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THE TAMMI TERRELL QUESTION
One aspect of the biographical record that has received varying amounts of attention is the question of whether Marvin Gaye felt responsible for Tammi Terrell’s death—and if so, why.
Terrell died of a brain tumor. Gaye had nothing to do with its development. There was no physical trauma he caused, no decision he made that contributed to her illness.
And yet his response to her death was so extreme—such a profound withdrawal from public life, such a deepening of depression and addiction, such an apparent identification with her suffering—that biographers and commentators have sought to explain it.