In the 20/20 interview airing tonight, Rihanna offers a graphic account of the fateful Feb. 7 confrontation with her then-boyfriend Chris Brown – including the terrifying blankness that seemed to come over him as he assaulted her.

She says all she kept thinking was, “When is it going to stop? When is it going to stop? He had no soul in his eyes. Just blank. He was clearly blacked-out. There was no person when I looked at him.”

The fight, she says, started when Brown received a text message from another woman while they were driving away from a Grammy Awards party.

“I caught him in a lie, and he wouldn’t tell the truth. And I wouldn’t drop it,” Rihanna tells Diane Sawyer in the interview, portions of which aired Friday morning on Good Morning America.

“I couldn’t take that he kept lying to me, and he couldn’t take that I wouldn’t drop it … It escalated into him being violent towards me. And it was ugly.”

How ugly? “I was battered, I was bleeding, I was swollen in my face,” she says. (more…)