During a recent interview with SiriusXM’s “Sway in the Morning,” Jada Pinkett Smith revealed a little more about her friendship with Tupac: when they first met, she was a drug dealer.
“It’s kinda hard because I haven’t really told the whole story,” she said. “One of the things that’s very interesting that I’ve never really said before is that when I first met Pac, when we first met, I was a drug dealer.”
But when they met, she was leaving the life, and he was “getting more into the life.”
–Jada Pinkett Smith breaks down in tears while slamming Tupac biopic–
“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 so that is something that I am constantly having to confront,” she recalled.
“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.”
She then went on to say that she wanted to share the story to give a little context to their relationship so that people would stop assuming that just because she was friends with a man it meant there was a romantic relationship.
“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.”
