Franchell "Frenchie" Davis (born May 7, 1979) is an American Broadway performer and a soul, dance/electronica, and pop singer. She came to public attention in 2003 as a contestant on the singing competition show American Idol. Davis began performing in Rent on Broadway soon afterward, and was a member of the cast for four years. In 2011, Davis reached the top 8 on the first season of singing competition The Voice. Early life and career Davis was born in Washington, DC, and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She graduated from Howard University in 2014 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. In the year 2000, she began her performing career in productions of Little Shop of Horrors and Jesus Christ Superstar with the Freilichtspiele Theatre Company in Schwabisch Hall, Germany. American Idol Davis was a contestant on the second season of American Idol in 2003, but was disqualified early in the season due to topless photos taken earlier in her career. According to Davis, she was up-front about her pictures: "When I first discovered that I had made it to Hollywood and found out I would be competing to get into the top 30 and then later in the top 12, they had given us all this paperwork to fill out, background checks and that whole thing. So when we were doing that I had a discussion with some members of the production staff and I exposed to them a piece of my past; that when I was 19 years old, I took some pictures and that’s not the person I am [anymore]. I wanted to be up-front about it. We talked about it and then nothing happened". The Idol staff took no action then, but two months later, they decided that Davis's participation would be inappropriate. "They had decided that because American Idol was a family show, that they could not have me on the show because of the pictures I had taken –though they had never seen the pictures," she told EuroWeb. She also added that no one was able to find the pictures in question as the website that featured them had been taken down. Double-standards controversy In 2007, revealing pictures of season six American Idol contender Antonella Barba surfaced on the internet, but Barba was kept on the show (though she was voted off shortly afterward). Many drew parallels to Davis's earlier situation. In an interview conducted