*While promoting her latest movie “Girls Trip” with SiriusXM’s “Sway in the Morning,” Jada Pinkett Smith revealed for the first time the secret behind how she got to know the late-great Tupac Shakur.
“It’s kinda hard because I haven’t really told the whole story,” she said. “I’ve never really said before is that when I first met Pac, when we first met, I was a drug dealer. Yes.”
At that time, she added, she was “coming out of that life” and he was “getting more into the life.”
“Something very bad happened to me,” she stated. “As I was coming out of the life, he was going more into the life. And so I’ve been having kind of an existential crisis around Pac … there was a point in which we met and then we kind of were going our separate ways. And I just felt like, ‘OK, God one day you’re going to do for Pac what you did for me, which is you saved me.’ And that just never happened for him. And that is something that I am constantly having to confront.”
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Pinkett Smith did not elaborate on her drug dealing hustle as a youth, noting she would later write a book about it.
“I just decided that one little piece was important to share finally because it gives more insight to who we were that it wasn’t just about, ‘You have this cute girl and this cool guy they must have been in this [romance]!’ Nah. It wasn’t that at all,” she said. “It was about survival and it’s always been about survival between us, you know what I’m saying? And holding each other down in ways that he and I could hold each other down.”
Pac was 25 years old when he was shot and killed in 1996. Last month, on what would have been the rapper’s forty-sixth birthday, a biopic titled “All Eyez On Me” was released and Pinkett Smith called the scene between them as a “reimagining” that was “deeply hurtful.
In her interview with Sway on Wednesday, she stressed how the film made her realize now more than ever how important it is for people to fully understand her relationship with Pac.
“I know that most people wanna always connect us in this romance thing, but that’s just because they don’t have the story. But it was based in survival, how we held each other down, you know what I’m saying? And when we have somebody that has your back when you feel like you’re nothing, that’s everything.”
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