Does This Former Pussycat Doll Regret Leaving Secular Music for Christ?
By Movieguide® Contributor
As a child, singer Kaya Jones prayed to sing like Whitney Houston, but evil people used her gift for their twisted gain before Jones gave her life to Christ.
“I saw Whitney Houston. It was 1991. She was singing the National Anthem, and I was in my living room, and I just remember going, wow, like she was wearing a tracksuit, and she had such authority, right,” Jones said on THE 700 CLUB.
“She commanded this presence. I went to bed that night. I got on my hands and knees, and I said, ‘Lord, one day will you give me a voice like Miss Whitney Houston?’ And that prayer went on for seven years and then he did give me a voice,” she said.
No one in her family sang, and Jones never had a voice lesson. She truly believes God gave her a voice.
Her first start in the music industry began with an audition to be in a group called The Pussycat Dolls.
“The audition was 2,000 girls…” she recalled. “I was the first one out. I remember getting right to the front and then kneeling down and I looked out in the audience and it was like Bono and Joy and Eve and Gwen and JC Shasez and 50 Cent.”
At first, she was excited to get the opportunity, but then she realized it was like a “prostitution ring.”
“You’re now part of a grooming process that curates young minds for a living,” she explained. “Telling kids what they should look like, how they should dress, who they should be.”
Her managers and talent executives controlled every aspect of her life.
“Everything. From what you eat to who you talk to…your given midnight phone calls, what you ate that day, it’s just control. So you you’re told what to eat so you start an eating disorder.”
“So that starts. So you’re very fragile to begin with and then you know,” she said.
She explained that things would happen where a powerful man or top executive would pick her up for an event in their personal car, instead of a normal driver, and bad things would happen.
“I made $500 a week as a Pussycat Doll,” she said. “We made nothing. We had no say in anything.”
She continued, “We had no control over anything. We were controlled. We were hired cast members, and that’s even what it says on the check.”
Britney Spears had a similar past, and likened her experience to “trafficking.”
When Jones heard Spears say that, she thought, “I hope everyone’s listening now because I said a prostitution ring, very similar conotation that I would use with what she said.”
Jones auditioned at age 17, became a Pussycat Doll at 18 and stopped at 21 after her managers forced her to have an abortion.
“We were performing at Divas Live. I had gone through a forced abortion,” she explained. “So if you get pregnant, you’re fired if you choose to keep it.”
“I’d had… abortion complications where in the abortion I was actually hemorrhaging during that time and being told by the owner how fat I look in process of losing my child and all these thoughts going through my mind of like what I was just told and how I look,” she said. “You’re just told all of these things..’You’re the hottest girl in here and you’re going to sing this song and you’re going to do well,’ and I’m thinking in my head like, ‘Do I look fat?’”
She saw two young kids in the front row, and the youngest turned to her mom and said, ‘Mommy, she’s a Pussycat Doll!” After Jones heard that, she felt awful about what she represented.
“I just felt gutted this little girl wants to be me or has this idea of beauty in this moment and I am so broken,” she recalled. “That was the beginning of ‘I got to get out of here. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but God you got to help me do it ’cause I can’t sell this to kids. I can’t do this. I can’t let that little girl think that this is beautiful because this is not beautiful.’”
Jones had a total of three abortions, the first at age 16 and the last at age 30.
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“From that last day of that whole synopsis of this train of trauma, I became very, very adamant about speaking about pro-life,” Jones shared. “Each one I’ve had to pray about, each one I’ve had to talk to God about, it has been a very private journey in getting my well-being mentally, emotionally, spiritually intact.”
Jones continued, “It is very painful; there is a lot of anger, there is a lot of frustration, there’s a lot of lack of knowledge, there’s a lot of regret. Nothing can make that go away other than God Himself when you lay it at His feet and ask for salvation on these issues.”
“How do we concede with things that we’ve done in our life, especially something that’s a murder in your body?” Jones said. “It was a boyfriend that made a comment and he said to me, just when I started really [wanting] to work for the Lord, I want to sing for God, that kind of stuff, he said, ‘Wait ’til your Christian fan base hears about what you’ve done,’ and I just thought, ‘You’re right. I am going to tell them because I have nothing to hide because God has made me new through Jesus Christ.’”
Jones knows that the idea that abortion is just a procedure is a lie. She’s seen and experienced first-hand the trauma of taking an unborn life.
“The PTSD is real. The pain is real. I’ve talked to people in the medical industry who work in mental facilities that talk about women who have had abortions, you know, rocking in the fetal position and going through severe torment on a spiritual level, and we don’t talk about it.”
Jones continued, “We go, well it’s just a clump of cells, and the Christian community, we’re at the forefront talking about it because we do know what God says in the scriptures about life. The only way you get through it is if you give it to God, and He wants to make the broken pieces right.”
She previously told Fox News, “I do think that there needs to be, just like on the packet of cigarettes, you see a Surgeon General warning [about cancer],” she explained. “We don’t have that for the abortion industry. We don’t have a clear understanding for women to really comprehend.”
Jones knows that whatever story someone has, whether abortion, abuse, addiction, or anything, it can all be handed over to God.
“We all have a story, right? We hand it to him and say, ‘You do what only you can do. We’re redeemed through Jesus and so how do we fix these mistakes where we’ve missed it? Bring it to him and say father forgive me for I didn’t know what I was doing.”
At this year’s Walk for Life San Francisco, Jones said that none of her success in the music industry, including a Grammy award, matters as much as the three babies she aborted.
“I think we’re missing the mark when we’re speaking to women,” she said. “We’re missing it. We’re condemning them and we need to love them because they’re in pain and even the Dolls, I pray for all of them. Even the people that did the things to me in the music industry I pray for all of them.”
Jones knows well the power of grace and understands that everyone is God’s child.
“If he’s given me grace then even the wicked ones in this world that you don’t think deserve, they deserve grace,” the singer said.
