Early on in the interview, Long asked him what the "activation moment of trauma" was for the rapper, and he said he was sexually abused when growing up. "I think there was several things," he shared. "The first was being left with a babysitter. There was a woman that was older than me... and her, touching and doing things to me that don't normally happen to kids."
Long asked "like molesting," and Jeezy replied, "Right, basically." He went on to explain that there was another major traumatic incident in his childhood, which had a big impact on him.
He continued, "Second thing was that I had this lady that lived next door to us in an apartment. She was married to this guy, they had two kids around my age and I used to hang out with them. And I was there one day, and I remember like it was yesterday, they got into an argument and, me and the little boys was playing in the room. And I heard them, you know, and I heard that saying before, 'Yeah you wait til I get back, I'll be right back.' I kind of looked at the boys, I'm like, 'Yo, you know.' And sure enough, he came running upstairs and he went in the closet, right, and when he was going to the closet he was fumbling through the closet. I saw when he pulled it out, it was like a big... silver 357. I looked at them and I immediately was like, 'yo we gotta hide.'"
He said the woman was shot four times by her husband. Eventually, police found Jeezy hiding under a sink. While he and the other kids were unharmed, the whole experience stuck with him. "I was eight, I had already accepted this is the norm," he said, noting that he was "desensitized."
"So one was not feeling safe and protected when you were molested, right, [and] two was a void of love and compassion and acceptance from your mom, and then the third one was, 'Okay now I'm going to completely disconnect from myself here because there is no love here and I'm going to go to the streets,'" Long said to Jeezy. "When I left my mother's house, I had to be about 13, 14," he said. "The reason why I left is because she pulled a gun on me and basically told me, like, 'You either going to either do what I say or I'm going to take you out this world.'"
Elsewhere in the interview, he opened up about his divorce from Jeannie Mai after two-and-a-half years of marriage.
“Integrity intact, I could never say anything that would not honor somebody. But I can tell you that this has not been an easy journey. I can tell you that I’m saddened, I can tell you that I’m disappointed, I can tell you that I’m uneasy,” said Jeezy. "But then again, God has put me in a different path, and that path is going to entail for me to take care of myself, and to love myself, and to be in the best situation. And I can thrive as someone who been through all the things I've been through."
Watch the full interview with Jeezy up top.
