"When you find love, you find it," Bobby Brown told ABC News' Robin Roberts, describing his rocky relationship with ex-wife Whitney Houston. "Or it finds you, I should say. It was so instant. We were so much like each other that it made sense."
The former New Edition singer, who is promoting his autobiography Every Little Step, due next week, sat down for a wide-ranging 20/20 interview that aired Tuesday night.
Brown, who met Houston at the 1989 Soul Train Awards, denied that he was the one who introduced the pop star to drugs. In fact, he wrote in his autobiography Every Little Step (due Tuesday), when he peeked in on her just before their 1992 wedding, he found her "hunched over a bureau, snorting a line of coke." He declined to partake.
According to the former New Edition singer, Houston was still a high-functioning drug user at that point. "She did drugs," he said. "They didn't do her."
However, Brown did not shrug off responsibility for his role in the escalation of her drug habit. He told Roberts that the couple would lock themselves in one wing of their mansion and go on cocaine binges while nannies looked after baby daughter Bobbi Kristina in another part of the house. But he maintains they never did drugs in front of their daughter.
"I always made it a point never to let her see me or my wife in that situation," he said, though he ceded that it was becoming harder to cover up their daily use.
He also admitted, "We failed Bobbi Kris. We could have been better. We should have been better. To be so young and have everything we wanted was a blessing and a curse."
Asked about Houston's infamous 2002 "crack is wack" interview with Diane Sawyer, Brown admitted it was a mistake for her to do the interview. "We both needed to get away from what we were doing," he says in hindsight. There was no reason for her to be on TV at that time."
He said their drug use reached its nadir in the last few years of the marriage, a period which he described as "terrible." It was a time in which "one of us would be trying to get clean when the other one didn't want to be clean." Ultimately, he said, Houston wouldn't stop using, leading to their 2006 separation. (The divorce was finalized the next year). "She just wasn't ready to go in that direction," he said.
It was during this phase, specifically late 2003, that Brown, struggling to maintain his sobriety, was arrested on a misdemeanor battery charge for hitting Houston.
When Houston was found dead in her Beverly Hills Hotel room in February 2009, Brown's relationship with their teen daughter hit its breaking point and they remained on the outs until 2014 when she decided to move to L.A. to be closer to him. But history repeated itself days before she could move west. On January 31, 2015, she was found unconscious in the bathtub at her suburban Atlanta townhouse. She was eventually placed in hospice care, where she died July 26 of that year. The official cause was pneumonia from immersion in the tub and a "toxic cocktail of drugs."
"If I could get those two days back, I would go and get her," he told Roberts tearfully. "My daughter would be here."
He continued, "I don't know what happened that night, but he does," refusing to say the name of his daughter's boyfriend, Nick Gordon, whom he and the administrator of his daughter's estate have sued for wrongful death. Gordon's legal team called the $10 million suit "meritless" and have sought to have it dismissed. He has not been indicted on any criminal charges.
Now clean and married to his manager, Alicia Etheredge-Brown, with two kids and another on the way," Brown proclaimed himself at peace. "There may be tears coming out of my eyes but I'm very happy right now. I have a beautiful wife, beautiful kids and a beautiful chance to do something else great. God ain't finished with me yet."
