In an interview with The Art of Dialogue on Wednesday, former Outlawz rap group member Napoleon claimed Jada Pinkett Smith once asked Tupac not to harm her then-boyfriend, Will Smith.
It is well known that Jada and Pac had a very close friendship when the West Coast rapper was alive. The two grew a special bond after they met at The Baltimore School for the Arts where they were enrolled as students during their teenage years. And though Jada claimed they were never physically attracted to each other, their relationship reportedly stoked tension between the California Love rapper and Will when the latter came into Jada’s life.
“I remember when I first came around ’Pac, Jada Pinkett was in a movie—might have been the first movie she ever starred in, with the Wayans brothers,” Napoleon recalled in the interview, according to XXL. And though he could not pinpoint the exact movie, Napoleon said Tupac had his eyes glued to the screen when he was watching that movie.
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“Then a couple days later, I heard him mentioning to someone that he knew the actress, which is Jada Pinkett,” the Tupac affiliate added. “Later on, she became a star. The second time I probably heard him talk about her is when he went to L.A. He was very upset. ’Pac came in the room and was like, ‘Jada, she gon’ contact me and tell me don’t do nothing to Will Smith.’ So ’Pac was upset and said, ‘I don’t know why she think I would have tried to make some problems with Will Smith.’ I guess it kind of hurt him… He had a lot of love for Jada Pinkett, a lot of respect for her.”
Face2Face Africa reported that in an interview on Power 105’s The Breakfast Club last year, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air actor opened up on how his jealousy over Jada and 2Pac’s relationship prevented him from getting to know the deceased emcee better.
“That [the jealousy] was in the early days,” the Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It rapper told host Charlamagne tha God. “That was a big regret for me, too, because I could never open up to interact with Pac.”
“They never had a sexual relationship, but now they had come into that age where that was a possibility, and Jada was with me, so Pac had a little thing on that,” he added. “But she just loved him. He was the image of perfection, but she was with the Fresh Prince. We were in the room together a couple times, I couldn’t speak to him. And he wasn’t gon’ speak to me if I wasn’t going to speak to him.”
