Despite all that's happened, Rihanna doesn't hate Chris Brown.
In fact, she still loves him.
"I don't hate him at all," she tells Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America. "I actually love and care about him and I'm concerned about him doing well. I want him to do well, have a great career, have a great life and grow up, and just take this as something that you had to go through to grow up and learn."
She may wish him the best, but neither this morning nor yesterday morning did she mention the words forgiveness, reconciliation or rekindle, although those are topics supposedly set to be tackled on tonight's 20/20 special.
The singer did, however, explain some of what happened in the car that fateful February night.
As is well known, the pop star pair was returning from a pre-Grammys party when Rihanna discovered a text message on Brown's phone from another woman.
"I caught him in a lie and he wouldn't tell the truth," she recalls. "I wouldn't drop it. I couldn't take that he kept lying to me and he couldn't take that I wouldn't drop it, because obviously his back was up against the wall. The truth is right here in the text message. So it escalated into him being violent towards me and it was ugly."
The starlet admits that as she wondered when the beating would stop, she could see that her "big love" was not himself.
"He had no soul in his eyes. Just blank. He was clearly blacked out. There was no person when I looked at him," she says.
She didn't know how to make it end or what to do next.
"I was battered. I was bleeding. I was swollen in my face. There was no way of me getting home. My next option was to get out the car and start walking in a gown and a bloody face. So I really don't know what was my plan. I didn't have a plan," she says.
"That whole night was not part of my plan," she adds profoundly.
Further details of what happened in the car, as well as an event from Rihanna's childhood she's never shared, are on the docket for tonight's longer chat on 20/20.
Around the same time, Brown will be sharing his thoughts with MTV. He admits he was anxious during the Larry King interview on CNN about the situation that put him back under public attack.
"I was super nervous," he says. "I did a lot of media training and a lot of stuff like that, and it kind of wasn't genuine to me. Everything I was saying was from my heart, but it was kind of controlled. 'Well, don't say it like this, because it will look like that...'
"I'm going to get public scrutiny or criticism regardless of what I say. So I just didn't know what was going to be said. I just wanted to let people know how I felt at the end of the day."
(Originally published Nov. 6, 2009, at 6:18 a.m. PT)
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Much happier things are happening over in the Big Picture gallery.