Simone Reyes is Scared. But Fear doesn’t Stop Her.

Photo: Simone Reyes ©

When we spoke to the “(You’re My) Happy Hour” singer, we thought we would ask about her country music career. Maybe chat a bit about what it’s like being “the boss” to mogul Russell Simmons. Or maybe how many Popular Science magazines her friend MCA had to light on fire in the “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” video. But it quickly became apparent that Simone Reyes identifies as a vegan and an animal-rights activist. She found us an hour to talk.

Editor’s Note: Bridget noted that after their discussion, Simone wondered aloud if her raw, honest talk about the realities of veganism would be too much. She said maybe I should edit out some of her real feelings so that others aren’t offended. To which I reminded her, “We have no intentions of editing you to make me feel better.”

Trigger warning: There is discussion of animal cruelty. Please take care while reading.

Pink Chair Storytellers: Anybody who knows you knows you have so many different identities. There’s Simone, Russell Simmons’ right hand. There’s Simone, the country music star. There’s Simone, the author. There’s Simone, the vegan. The show producer. Where did it all start? Actually, let’s start in Manhattan. Tell me a story.

Simone: Yes, I’m from Greenwich Village. I grew up in a “hippy community.” I went to P.S. 41, and that school is so wonderful because it is smack in the middle of Greenwich Village. It was a melting pot, and so was my apartment building. From a very young age I was exposed to so many different nationalities. Being in the village, I knew I had an understanding of what homosexuality was at a very young age. When it’s part of your community, you don’t question it at all or think that other people might find it offensive or weird or anything like that. It’s completely normal, and so for that, I’m so grateful for growing up in that incredibly wonderful community. And so, actually, when I hear people homeschooling, I get a little nervous because I think if I had been homeschooled in so many ways, I would have missed out on just, you know, the wonderment, the incredible experience of getting to know so many different people from so many different nationalities and walks of life. I’m a huge advocate of the public school system. I wouldn’t have traded that for anything in the world.

I grew up in the age of the Son of Sam when New York was considered one of the most dangerous, if not the most dangerous place to live. I was held up with a gun, at the age of 13. I rode trains by myself, sometimes to school before I was 14. I mean, my friends would all come on the train from the Upper West Side. We didn’t even think about it. I think when Etan Patz was abducted in Tribeca, that was a huge wake-up call for a lot of parents. I think a lot of parents thought, there are so many people around what could possibly happen? There are so many people everywhere in New York. You go out at 4:00 in the morning and you’re not alone. Delis are open, nightclubs are open, and the city is alive at all hours. But I think that made a lot of parents say, “Oh my God, these abductions don’t just happen in rural communities, they can happen right here.”

I honestly don’t even know how we got around because I was a club kid. I went to my first club at 14. I was allowed to go to nightclubs throughout my entire high school as long as I kept my grades up. All of my friends did. Some of my friends used to go to the nightclub to do their homework before it opened. I don’t know how we all found each other, though, because we didn’t have cell phones. Now, I think that young people are a lot more insulated. I think the internet is an incredible tool, especially for activism and for connecting people, but I think in a lot of ways it disconnects people. It also makes people feel a lot more comfortable speaking to people they don’t know personally, which is dangerous. I wonder if they’ll be able to communicate as effectively without that real one-on-one connection I had. I spoke on the phone. Kids nowadays text each other in the same room.

Growing up in the city the way you did, I think you had an awareness about what’s around you that gets lost when you have your face in your phone all the time.

How did you meet Russell Simmons and become his assistant?

I met him through the nightclub scene. I am friends with the Beastie Boys and we all kind of just ran together. You know, New York kids. We were all at the same nightclubs. Most of us went to the same schools. I was really good friends with Rick Rubin's girlfriend——Rick is arguably one of the best producers in the world——and she was just sort of like, “Def Jam is opening on Elizabeth Street and they need a receptionist.” I’d been going to college at night and then working at Tower Records, which was also a hub of excitement. And all of the time that I’d been working there I just knew I wanted be around the music business in some way. And then I just became a receptionist over at Def Jam.

And today you’re a country music star. How does that happen that you can be in the hip-hop world but also the country music world?

Honestly, I just think I’m a rebel! I think maybe if I’d grown up working for somebody who was classically trained or whatever, then I’d be into punk. Hip hop was, and is, an incredible art form, and it’s always been sort of a point of contention between Russell and me. He’s like, “You were raised on hip-hop, how are you a country artist?” But even he has said many times: hip-hop and country might seem like genres at opposite ends of the spectrum, but hip-hop is so provocative and incredibly popular because it’s truthful. And whether you like it or not, rappers are poets and they speak from their communities, they speak from their life, their culture, and they speak about what is wrong with it and what they love about it. Country music is the same. In country music, you hear about what it’s like to live a country life, what it’s like to live now with tractors and on farms and drinking whiskey, and all of the things about the culture. Does every country fan love Trump and do they all vote red? No. And are all hip-hop artists gangbangers? Of course not. But a lot of hip-hop artists grew up in extreme poverty and grew up in extreme violence, and that was part of their reality at a very young age. That’s very similar to country music. A lot of people grew up in poverty and a lot of people grew up around guns. So both are telling the story of their experience in a way that is provocative and honest, and sometimes hard to digest by the masses.

What about the storytelling aspect of country music attracted you?

It’s like a movie, right? When I watch a movie, if I can’t relate to it on some level, then it’s not going to resonate with me and I’ll turn to something else. It’s the same with songwriting and storytelling. At the end of the day, we all relate to the same common themes of heartbreak and love and jealousy and rage, and whatever. With country music, the artists so beautifully tell the story of their lives but also of their hearts, and that’s just so attractive to me. You know, I love a good song that makes you cry based on the beauty of how authentic it is. Country music is so full of those stories.

If I asked anyone on the street, “Do you know Simone?” I might hear, “Oh yeah, she’s the author” or “she’s the singer.” People also call you the “Gloria Steinem of animal rights.”

That’s a huge compliment! Not one I know I can live up to, but it’s very nice!

Tell me about your animal rights activism and your veganism.

I didn’t grow up vegan. Most people don’t. More people do now, but at the time, no, I didn’t. My friends Sato, one of my best friends in the world, and my friend, Elizabeth, started the “I Love Animals Club” in 6th grade and raised money for the Humane Society. At the time, my mother was, and still is, fiercely protective of animals. My father always taught me compassion and kindness. So it was really just about doing the math. People love to say, “I love animals.” As an activist, I correct them. “Do you love all animals?” They’re like, “Of course I love animals!” And I ask, “What did you have for breakfast today? What did you have for dinner last night?” So, you don’t love all animals. You love domesticated animals, maybe? Or you love an animal that you see in a zoo, which is a prison. But, you don’t love all animals because to love something, you have to respect for them, and you certainly don’t respect an animal that you wear or eat.

It’s a hard line that I think we have to draw in the same way that you look at any social justice movement. You don’t have to jump into the fight for groups that are oppressed. Whether it’s Black Lives Matter, whether it’s women’s rights, reproductive rights, whatever it is, you don’t have to jump in, but I think it is completely reasonable to ask you not to be a part of the injustice. So, when people eat meat or drink dairy and say that they are a feminist, for example, I take issue with that. I don’t believe you can be a feminist and drink milk, because everything that feminism stands for, which is the right of a mother to have their child or to not have a child, or to be against r*pe, to be against violence, all of those are everyday practices in the dairy industry. Imagine if a human woman were to give birth, and was constantly artificially impregnated so that she could use her breast milk to feed every child in the neighborhood. We’re getting into “A Handmaid’s Tale” territory. But that’s what is done to animals every day, and then the animals don’t get to raise their animals. We know that cows scream after their babies and run after trucks when those babies are ripped from them. So, I think, people have to really open their hearts and their consciousness so that when they use the word “feminism,” they understand what that means. It shouldn’t just be for female humans; it should be for all females, for all animals.

What is the life of a vegan?

The life of the vegan is simply to do our best, to do no harm. Now, does that mean that we are all perfect? Absolutely not! I once saw a skit on SNL, which was meant to be funny and instead it kind of opened up my eyes, where they said, and I’m paraphrasing, “A million activists descended on Washington today to fight for animal rights and two billion ants were killed in the process.” Of course, we can’t do everything perfectly, but it’s so easy to do so much. You know, we are living in 2022, when meat substitutes are in every major supermarket. It doesn’t matter what city you’re in. They’re in every major supermarket. You can eat beans and rice and have a completely healthy meal. And there are so many options to be warm. It’s proven that you don’t need to use down or fur, for heaven’s sake, to keep you warm. Some synthetics keep you much warmer. Layering your clothes makes you warmer than wearing a fur coat.

So being vegan means not using animals for any reason. No for food and not wearing them. So, I don’t wear wool, silk, suede, or leather. I don’t give money to institutions and organizations that do animal research. I don’t go to to aquariums. I don’t ride on carriage horses. I don’t go to rodeos. I don’t bet on horses. I don’t use animals for any reason at all.

I’m the Vice President of Communications for Social Compassion and Legislation. We passed legislation in California to ban puppy mills. That means you can’t get an animal that came from a pet shop, only from a reputable rescue or a shelter. The truth is, we can function better for our climate, for our consciousness, or overall compassion by not using animals for any reason whatsoever. My cat is in my house, and I want nothing from her. She doesn’t have to pay rent, she doesn’t even have to sit on my lap if she doesn’t want to, and she seldom does [laughing]. I don’t want anything from her, and that’s a gift—that she’s here and I feel that way about every animal on the earth. They owe me nothing, nothing.

I was in my 20s when I became vegan. I had the blessing, I would say, of joining a group called Activists for Animals. At the time, you know, there was no internet or anything like that. So I had seen a seal hunt on television, on a documentary, and I saw Brigitte Bardot trying to stop a seal hunt, which is one of the hardest things to witness. Baby seals are beautiful, brand-new to the world, and they’re with their mothers. To get their fur, they’re beaten to death on the ice, which turns the worst, the worst shade of red. The mother seals are screaming, desperately trying to save their babies. And Brigitte Bardot, who’s been a long-time animal rights activist, was there on the ice with her arms wrapped around a baby saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll get them.”

We have not been able to stop the fur trade. We haven’t been able to stop the actual seal hunt in Canada. Even with Pamela Anderson and Paul McCartney going to the ice and begging for the lives of these babies. What Brigitte Bardot said resonated with me. I was like, “Who’s ‘We’? I want to be part of that army! I want to try to stop them!” The only group that I’d ever heard of that was trying to do anything like that was PETA.

So I called I called the organization. There was a group that protest in front of the big department stores for cosmetic testing. They’re outside of the carriage horses and they do vegan demos. I didn’t know what any of that was, but I showed up to the first protest wearing leather shoes. Instead of being judgmental, they educated me. It’s a hard-hearted person who doesn’t do anything after watching a video of animals being anally electrocuted or vaginally electrocuted or beaten to death or having their throats slit while they’re still alive, being put into scalding water.

I know they’re out there. I know those people are out there. They don’t usually orbit in my world. I’m always happy to teach people. I don’t expect people to be vegan when I meet them, but if they want to learn why they should be vegan and then they still go, “It doesn’t matter to me.” That, to me, is something I can’t get behind. I don’t understand it, I don’t, you know, I guess I don’t respect it because at the end of the day, when you see, not just hear about the torture that happens, nobody should, in good conscience, be part of it.

So did you just go to the office the next day and say, “I’m a vegan now.” Because this sounds like a full-time job!

It was, but you know you can’t say that to Russell Simmons! [laughing] So, I brought the activism into the office. And if you talked to any of the old Def Jam crew it’s hilarious. They would walk into my office, covering their eyes because there would be slaughterhouse photos all over my office. I had a doctored-up fur coat, a vintage fur, that I had doctored up and wrote “fur is dead” on it with fake blood. It was hanging in my office. And I would have flyers for everyone. I came into the movement very aggressively. I was very opinionated, loud. Throughout the years, I learned how to dial it back because some people respond well to giant displays of protest, and others need to be walked through it. You know, holding their hands and talking softly. And I’m willing to do any of it. You know all of it.

You said in one of your TEDx talks, “It might isolate us from those close to us. It may take our safety and freedom and put us at risk. It may drive us to depths of despair and break our hearts, but it’s worth it.”  Did you experience a lot of isolation?

You know, most of my friends are in the movement, the ones that aren’t I still have hope that they’ll get there, don’t give up on people. But yes, it’s isolating and uncomfortable. I was in a long-term relationship, and he is vegan as well. Holidays were always a huge problem because there was a big dead bird on the table. It makes other people uncomfortable, too, because they start to look at the choices they’re making and feel guilty, or worry they’ll be attacked. You know, I’ve lost friends over declawing cats. If I tell you that it’s like taking the fingers off of your cat, if I tell you that it’s going to make them more likely to be aggressive, if I tell you that it’s going to break their hearts, and you still go and do it, it’s hard for me to stay close friends with you.

So, I’ve lost friends over it, but for the most part, my circle is very, very strong and very strongly vegan. But I don’t give up on people. PETA’s co-founder, Ingrid Newkirk, who’s kind of like, you know, “all hail the queen” says, “Don’t date vegans! How are you going to grow the movement if you date a bunch of vegans?”

I’ve seen clips of footage where people are pushing back on you pretty hard.

Well, I’ve learned that there’s a time and a place and, especially after the pandemic, you do have to be careful how you approach people. People are not as mentally well as they were before this pandemic. People were isolated, people were off their meds, and people did not have their meetings as readily available to them. People have lost family members to COVID. They’ve lost neighbors. They’ve lost fathers and mothers. People have struggled, and people have been afraid for their own lives. So you have to be careful, and you’ll never get the message of compassion across by not showing it.

When I was young in the movement, I didn’t quite understand that. I was very angry, as most people in the movement are. I mean, I’m still angry. But I don’t see the person whom I’m trying to get my point across as the enemy. The enemy is our inability as a culture to not move from unconscious to conscious. The media pushes the idea that animals are somehow here for us to use, and the government has done that in many ways by subsidizing the meat and dairy industries. But we’re in such a great position now that when kids see that Billy Eilish is a huge animal-rights activist, it means something to them. When Kim Kardashian says, ”I’m vegan,” that means something to them. I don’t think you can be more of an animal-rights activist than Joaquin Phoenix. When he won the Oscar, everybody went to an Oscar party, but he brought the press to show pigs on their way to slaughter. We’re in a good position right now, with so many celebrities joining the fight.

But back to your question. I try to meet people where they are, and if all they can do is say, “You know what, I might not be able to be vegan right now, but I’m going to stop wearing fur because that’s ridiculous.” I’ll take it. I’ll take that. If somebody can say, “I can’t believe how good oatmeal milk tastes,” Okay, I’ll take that. Once people start to open their hearts just a little bit more, as long as they are open to it, can get there. But they have to be open to learning more. I still have to have faith in humanity. I have seen people who own slaughterhouses, who have raised animals their entire lives for food, switch to vegetables. Who have rescued their entire last herd or their last last giant batch of chickens. There’s a huge movement of animal rights activists helping these farms switch to something that’s more sustainable, something that’s more ethical, and certainly something that’s better for the climate.

Climate change is real. Climate change is going to be the end of all of us. None of this is going to matter if this keeps going in the trajectory that it’s going. As somebody who doesn’t have children, if I did, I would be in crisis mode, thinking they’re not even going to survive their whole lives, their natural lives, given the state of this. And arguably, the number one cause of that is animal agriculture. So if people care about the future, the best thing they can do is go vegan. Most of us aren’t traveling on private planes all the time. It’s easy to say, “those private planes, they have to go!” or “those fossil fuels!” You can do it just from inside your house. You can just stop eating animals and make a gigantic contribution to this earth. These wildfires and these floods and all of these catastrophes—I mean it’s obvious, the climate is in crisis.

You told me your father was incredibly passionate, and your mother is a huge animal lover. So are they your biggest cheerleaders?

My dad passed away during the pandemic.

Oh Simone, I’m so sorry.

Yes. It was terrible. I had to watch his funeral on Zoom. Yeah, just insane, but I couldn’t take the risk of going because I actually had driven across the country to get my mother, who’s in her 80s, and I couldn’t take a plane to go to his funeral and risk bringing COVID back. I just couldn’t risk it. I wasn’t going to lose both of my parents. It was unthinkable to me, so I had to do what I had to do in order to keep my mom safe.

My Dad was a compassionate man, he was soft-spoken, had a great sense of humor. Always supported my activism. I was grateful when Facebook became a thing, and he was, in the last decade of his life, able to watch what my activism meant to me. He would donate to causes that I cared about. And he respected it. That was really important to me. My mom is now vegan, and she understands why. I send her dinner every night, so she kind of doesn’t have a choice. One of my earliest memories was of her calling the police on a man who was beating his dog. And showing such compassion to our animals as we grow up. So, yeah, they both understand and understood why I ended up this way. I don’t think anybody could have imagined I would be as radical or as outspoken or an extremist, as some people like to call me. I don’t think you can get much more vegan than I am, but I think they understand. I’m never shy about fighting for what’s right.

But when do you have time to record all this music and take phone calls to rescue pigs?

It’s true, the music has taken a back seat a little bit because, well, you know. But I never wanted to get into rescue. I knew that it was too emotionally draining, and I knew that if you get sucked in, then it takes all your time. And there are so many incredible trench workers that I always marveled at, and I always thought that was not for me. I’m the person who will do campaigns, work on legislation, and do speaking engagements. That’s what I felt comfortable doing. During the pandemic, shelters took a nose-dive. They were closed to the public, and animals were not being accepted into shelters. It was a disaster. I had time in quarantine, so I tried to help. So unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, people tend to call me when there’s an animal in trouble, a farm animal, particularly a pig.

What is next?

Right now, I still work for Russell, and so he’s always got me busy researching things, writing things, writing books. That’s what I do a lot with him. I’ve got a new song that I’m speaking to my producer, Al Bonhomme, about recording as soon as possible. I’m already thinking about the video for it.

And right now, of course, I’m in the middle of a rescue. My friend Cindy and I, she has a rescue called Tiny Masters, she is incredible, she has so many animals. This pig we rescued is morbidly obese, basically dying at the shelter, and had been one of the worst cases of trauma I have ever encountered. We kind of knew that it was bad. We didn’t know how bad it was. Then we learned that she was only eating one Fig Newton a day at the shelter. She was going to die there. She’s a pig, so should probably weigh, at most, maybe 175 pounds. She’s 500 pounds, 600 pounds, something like that.

What is authentic Simone?

I want people to know that anything that I have accomplished or anything that I hope to accomplish, I have done, and I will continue to do, scared. And I did it anyway. It’s something you can’t ever let stand in your way. Because even if you fail, it’s a better feeling ultimately than saying, “What if?” That’s not comfortable for me. We’ve all lived with failure. We’ve all failed. It’s impossible to get through this life without failing. But people become paralyzed by their fear. They think for some reason that [I’m not scared] doing a TedX talk, which was terrifying, terrifying; or singing a song in front of an audience for the first time, terrifying; or opening up the National Animal Rights Conference in front of people that have been in it longer than I have and know a lot more than I do; or speaking to a public official who has so much power and here’s your moment with them. I’m afraid every single time! I’m always afraid, of course! But if I waited for that fear to go away, it would never go away. So you have to just do it, do it scared! do everything that you want in your life that’s important to you scared and know that you’re no different than anybody else. Just do it, do it scared! I would say that’s the most important lesson that I learned and I’m still learning. Do it scared!