Nicki Minaj and her ex-boyfriend Safaree Samuels have been all over the headlines in recent days, following Nicki’s Funk Flex interview and both parties’ subsequent tweetstorms. But the ex-couple has a very long history, and this is far from their first public confrontation. Below, a history of their key moments.
2002: Nicki Joins Hood$tars
DJ and photographer Neil Grant (a.k.a. the man who took these photos) plays a song of Nicki’s for Bow-legged Lou of Full Force. Lou is impressed and meets the young rapper soon thereafter.
“Even when she first came to my house in Brooklyn, she was doing her dialects back then—her English dialect,” Lou later told the New York Post. So Lou decides to team her up with his son Lou$tar and another rapper named Svn-Up—and, shortly thereafter, Lou$tar’s high school friend, Safaree Samuels, who rapped under the name “SB.”
2005: Going Solo
July 2011: Altercation in Dallas
December 2011: Engagement Rumors
March 2014: 10th Anniversary
October 2014: First Reports of a Breakup
November 2014: “Bed of Lies”
December 2014: ‘An Emotional Wreck’
January 2015: Safaree Claims Co-Writing Credit
January 2015: Safaree Backtracks
June 2015: The Response Track, Pt. 1
July 2015: The Response Track, Pt. 2
July 2015: ‘You Don’t Even Know How to Pronounce These Motherf*cking Words’
November 2015: First Reports of a Lawsuit
October 2016: Safaree Reveals He’s Dropping the Suit
March 2017: Wendy Williams
June 2017: The Fight
August, 2018: Funk Flex Interview, Twitter Beef, and TMZ
Nicki sits down with Funk Flex, ostensibly to promote her new album, Queen. Instead, talk turns to the early days of her career. She starts by going in on Safaree’s on-again-off-again ghostwriting claims.
"It don't give you a right to lie about someone's craft just because you know that they're a woman and people will believe you. So now, years later, you want to come back and say 'I lied' after you've tried to tarnish my image,” she says. And in a surreal, full-circle moment, she actually speaks to Lou$tar on the phone to talk about Safaree’s role in Hood$tars. (“He was the hypeman,” Lou$tar explains).
From there, things get crazier. In the interview and ensuing tweets, Nicki accuses Safaree of hiring escorts while they were together, and subsequently stealing their credit cards. She also says that she ponied up $10,000 to fix her ex’s hairline.
Safaree sees all of this and responds on Twitter. “I didn't use your card for prostitutes,” he says. He then accuses her of “messing with meek a few years b4 y’all got together.” And then things turn really serious.
“Remember the night you cut me and i almost died the police and ambulance had to take me out the crib on a stretcher and I had to lie and tell them I was trying to kill myself so they wouldn't take you to jail,” he continues. And the following day, he claims the whole exchange was a victory:
In the aftermath of the interview and Twitter exchange, a TMZ reporter says that there is footage backing up Safaree’s most shocking claim.
“We’ve actually seen the video here at TMZ, back in 2014, that shows Nicki chasing Safaree with a knife,” Van Lathan tells a radio station. “We should say, don’t know what happened after that. Couples get into it; sometimes things get heated. There’s no reason why you should be chasing someone with a knife, but we don’t know if Nicki actually stabbed him with a knife.”