VH1 interview: Fantasia was trying to commit suicide

Fantasia Barrino knew what she was doing.

In a VH1 "Behind the Music" interview airing Tuesday, the same day her third album drops, the 2004 "American Idol" winner claims she was trying to commit suicide when she overdosed on aspirin and a sleep aid a few weeks ago.

The overdose, which happened Aug. 9 in Charlotte, N.C., followed a divorce filing by Paula Cook, wife of Barrino's boyfriend Antwaun Cook, whom Barrino said she believed was separated.

"I didn't have any fight in me," Barrino, 26, says in interview transcripts VH1 made public Monday. "I didn't care about anything. . . . At that moment, I wanted out. I wanted it to be over with - all of it."

The interview excerpts make no mention of Barrino's daughter, Zion, 9, or of the girl's reaction to recent events.

"I just sat in the closet and looked at the mirror and took all the pills in the bottle," Barrino says in the transcript. "I wanted to go to sleep and just be at peace. I knew exactly what I was doing. You can't accidentally take a whole bottle of pills."

Barrino's manager, Brian Dickens, told the show: "She'd been crying all day. . . . Fantasia texted me, saying, 'I love you.' I wrote back, 'I love you more.' Then it hit me. . . . I went into Fantasia's room and saw her on the floor, and my heart just dropped."

Says the singer, "I remember waking up in the hospital [and thinking], 'It didn't work, I'm still here . . . with all this drama going on.' " Crediting a nurse named Melanie for telling her "what I needed to hear," Barrino said she realized "how people end up in the grave. Because that one moment of just breaking. . . . That was somewhere I don't ever want to go again."

Read Glenn Gamboa's review of Fantasia's "Back to Me" in Tuesday's Explore LI.