KARRINE STEFFANS ESSENCE.COM INTERVIEW: WHY SHE'LL NEVER MARRY, IRV GOTTI & MALE GROUPIES

Two years after selling nearly 400,000 copies of Confessions of a Video Vixen, a scandalous memoir that outed bold-faced names, making a memorable appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, starting an organization for girls under the banner of female empowerment, and allegedly breaking up the marriage of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, Karinne Steffans, 29, is back. The sometime actress, one-time video dancer and full-time entrepreneur is set to tell even more in her eagerly anticipated follow-up The Vixen Diaries (Grand Central Publishing, $24.99), which will be released on September 25. In this first part of a two-part series, essence.com spoke with Steffans about the fallout from Confessions, her new male groupies and the reasons why she'll never get married.

ESSENCE.com: You put a lot of folks' business on blast in Confessions. What more is there to say and how is Vixen Diaries going to be different?
Karrine Steffans: It's a diary and reads like a reality show. I wrote this in real time. Whatever happened that night, I would come home and write it as soon as I got home, so it's still very much in the moment and very fresh. And this book is more Hollywood, where the first book was mostly music, and I no longer live in that world. I live in L.A.

ESSENCE.com: Since Confessions are you persona non grata in Hollywood, New York, Miami and Atlanta?
K.S.: I was like the plague until people realized I wasn't going away after the international success of my book. Now I find that a lot of people want to be in my book because they want to be immortalized. It's almost like being a gossip guru but so much deeper than that. People will tell me things and say, "Be sure you write about this... Can I be in your book?" It's become this "club" that people want to join. I made it to Oprah, so people want to jump on the bandwagon.

ESSENCE.com: So now you have groupies?
K.S.: (Laughs) Believe it or not, I have more male groupies. I had a weird experience with Jamie Foxx with whom I have a long history and we're cool. He was acting like he was in awe of me, and I'm like, "Yeah, right, you're the famous one with an Oscar."

READ MORE OF THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW + PART II