Jada Pinkett Smith is best known as a fabulous actor and the wife of Will Smith, but at one time, she ran in some pretty controversial circles. She previously kept quiet about her past, but was finally willing to give fans a glimpse into her drug-dealing days in a recent interview with Sway in the Morning.
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The drug-dealing revelation occurred as Pinkett Smith was discussing her relationship with Tupac Shakur. “One of the things that’s very interesting that I’ve never really said before is that when I first met Pac, I was a drug dealer,” Pinkett Smith explained. As you may already know, the two met in high school and were close friends, but as Pinkett Smith began to abandon her troubled lifestyle, Shakur found himself more entrenched in a world that ultimately prompted his downfall.
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“As I was coming out of the life, he was going more into the life.” She added that while people have long assumed it was all romance for her and Shakur, the relationship was in actuality a shared struggle for survival. “I know that most people want to always connect it in this romance thing, and that’s just because they don’t have the story. It was based in survival, how we held each other down and [how] when you have somebody that has your back when you feel like you’re nothing, that’s everything.”
Shakur’s sad fate still troubles Pinkett Smith to this day, although she insists that she has no interest in protecting his legacy. However, she sometimes wonders why she was spared and why he succumbed. “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.”
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It can’t be easy for Pinkett Smith to talk about Shakur and her past as a drug dealer, even after all these years. We think she’s incredibly brave. She plans to share more in an upcoming book, which will clear up some of the misconceptions she believes the recent biopic All Eyez On Me spread. Until then, we suspect she’ll continue to set fans straight in additional interviews and, of course, on Twitter.
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