A Timeline of Nicki Minaj and Safaree's Relationship

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.”

Around 2005, following several years of effort but only middling success, Hood$tars splits up after Safaree is kicked out. Nicki stands by her man and leaves as well.

Nicki and Safaree get into a scuffle in a Dallas hotel. Nicki claims that Safaree hit her in the face with a suitcase, cutting the inside of her lip.

As Nicki rises to fame, Safaree is around as her hype man, but their relationship is kept quiet. She later explains to GQ that the silence was a business decision.

“When I came in the business, you couldn’t tell people you were in a relationship, because record company and management said that doesn't make you appealing to men. So don't tell people you’re in a relationship,” she says.

So it catches fans’ attention when Nicki is spotted wearing a big diamond ring—something that sparks speculation that she and Safaree are engaged.

In late October, Safaree is seen in public with his Nicki tattoos covered up. Just days later, TMZ reports that he and Nicki are no longer a couple. The reason? “[H]e became uncontrollably jealous of her success.”

Nicki debuts the track “Bed of Lies” on an MTV awards show the following month, and officially releases it just days later. The song, about someone who has a tendency to “lie” and “pretend,” is widely assumed to be about Safaree.

TMZ claims that Safaree is having “suicidal thoughts.” The gossip site says that Safaree is convinced that Meek Mill destroyed their relationship with false cheating accusations.

Safaree gives an interview to the Breakfast Club where he is surprisingly decent when talking about the breakup. He also claims that he was the one to end the relationship. “I’m not going to say I broke up, but I left,” he says.

However, when it comes to music, he is less kind. “Every time it came to writing raps and doing music, it was her, me, and the beat,” he explains. “She doesn’t do it by herself. It's me and her.” He claims that he’s only saying all of this because of Nicki’s response to a tweet by comedian Lil Duval. “Safaree and nicki rap just alike it just sounds corny coming from a grown ass man,” Duval writes. Nicki responds, “Duval aint Lyin. But when u love ppl u try to hide their weaknesses sometimes. Protect them from looking corny. Live & ya learn.”

Not long after the interview, Safaree changes his tune. He tweets, “She is wayyy more than capable of writing a album on her own without me! shes not a dumb person, so its easy for smart ppl to come up with the witty and smart things that she says! i dnt kno about other ppl but i kno when it comes to writing flow n delivery she is 1 of the best if not the best.she has her style i have mine. so stop saying i write her stuff! not true!!! she sits w/a pen&pad &does it herself!”

Safaree releases “Love the Most,” a song where he talks about his relationship with Nicki. “No one will love you like I did,” he raps. “Twelve years up in flames.” On the track, he also says that their breakup was caused by “somebody new...whisper[ing] in your ear,” in what pretty much everyone takes as a reference to Meek.

The scorned former boyfriend returns with “Lifeline.” In the song, in addition to insulting Meek a ton, Safaree claims he wrote some of Nicki’s lyrics, specifically on “Roman’s Revenge.”

Nicki hits back, responding from the stage during a concert in Toronto.

“A bitch-ass nigga can’t write my raps,” she says. “You know why? You don’t have the heart or the mind frame or the motherfucking intellect, bitch nigga. You don’t even know how to pronounce these motherfucking words in my motherfucking raps, bitch.”

In November, reports that Safaree is planning to sue Nicki surface. The suit will supposedly claim that Safaree played a major role in much of the music Nicki has released, and as a result he wants a chunk of the money from her first three albums.

In an interview with Rap-Up, Safaree says he’s not going through with his lawsuit against Nicki.

“I dropped everything,” he says. “I’d started a process and then I was like, ‘It is what it is. If you want to deal with it like that, go ahead. I ain’t trippin’.’ I’m doing a lot and I don’t want to have to deal with depositions and courts and all of that. Ain’t nobody threatened me. Ain’t nobody make me do it. At the end of the day, I didn’t even wanna do it. I just know if it was me and the shoe was on the other foot, I’d handle it and just say, ‘Peace out. Here. Do what you gotta do. That’s it.’ But I just dropped it.”

Safaree goes on Wendy Williams’ show to reiterate his once-taken-back claims of writing for Nicki. “It was a collaborative effort,” he says. “[She] doesn’t sit there and do absolutely nothing, but I definitely was a helping force in everything that had to do with creating music.” He also hints that his former girlfriend had plastic surgery.

There is unexpected drama at DJ Khaled’s pre-BET Awards party. Safaree is assaulted by people he claims are members of Meek Mill’s crew—and Meek was in fact getting out of his SUV right as the incident happened. Meek doesn’t admit to being involved, but doesn’t directly deny it, either. “I’m a don,” he says. “I don’t need to fight.”

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.”