During an appearance on SiriusXM’s Sway in The Morning on Wednesday, the actress revealed that she was dealing drugs when she met Tupac Shakur for the first time.
“It’s kind of hard because I haven’t really told the whole story,” she said of her relationship with the late rapper. “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.”
“That’s how we started,” she continued. “Then as I was coming out, something very bad happened to me. As I was coming out of the life, he was coming more into the life.”
The actress’ enduring and tumultuous friendship with Shakur has long been the subject of scrutiny. As young students in the mid-’80s, Pinkett Smith and Shakur bonded quickly.
“Pac and I’s relationship was about survival,” she said. “That’s how it started. 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 when you have somebody that has your back when you feel like you’re nothing, that’s everything. There’s a lot of components to our story that we’ve never shared for a very specific reason. I just decided that this one little piece was important to share finally because it gives more insight to who we were. It was about survival and it’s always been about survival between us.”
When Shakur was killed in September 1996, Pinkett Smith, 45, hadn’t been speaking to her friend after a heated argument about their changing lives.
Last month, the actress took to social media to correct what she said are misrepresentations of her relationship with the late rapper in the new biopic All Eyez on Me.
“The reimagining of my relationship to Pac has been deeply hurtful,” she began, explaining in another Tweet, “Forgive me … my relationship to Pac is too precious to me for the scenes in All Eyez On Me to stand as truth.”
