Monica Back in Spotlight After Tragedy

July 26 -- She was the youngest artist to have a No. 1 record. She was a teenage Grammy winner basking in glamor, beauty and newfound fame. Just as pop star Monica stood at the brink of superstardom, a tragedy took her away from the spotlight.

"I could go through gory details that would spin heads for days. That's not my goal. My goal is to show me after the storm," Monica said.

As a child, Monica joyfully embraced music, but when she was 6 years old, her world was shattered by her parents' divorce. She found herself pulled between two dramatically different worlds: that of her churchgoing mother and her street-smart father.

"It's kind of like when I say, I'm a mixture of two worlds, that's just what I became. When my parents split, I became two separate people," she said.

But those two people would eventually collide … Just 12 years old when she was discovered in a talent show, Monica's almost instant fame put her on a fast and slippery track. The more success she tasted, the more she turned back to the life she knew with her father, a gritty and often dark world. "I chose to hang in places where I had to witness a lot of things that most people my age wouldn't dream about seeing, and probably couldn't sleep if they did," she said.

Monica, now 22, said she's learned some hard lessons in her struggle to balance these competing worlds, "Some of the things that I've chosen have had repercussions. I've suffered 'em, I've learned from 'em and then I keep moving. I'm just thankful to still be here."

"Some of her memories of the streets remain vivid, "As I walk out the door, I hear these blows. Who would have ever thought it was a human, being beat repeatedly by two people with steel bats, over $10. That's the kind of stuff that you just can see every day. And I went on and I got on the plane and went back to the other side of my other life," Monica said. The other side was the glittery, polished world of a singing star.

But it was in the darker part of her life that Monica would meet two troubled men, who would forever alter her life. They were men she thought she could save.