Cardi B is opening up about the “wrong things” she did in an Instagram Live video, where she said she used to drug and rob men.
An Instagram Live video from three years ago reappeared online and it has since received backlash. So much so, the hashtag #SurvivingCardiB is trending on Twitter.
In the recently resurfaced video, the Bronx-born artist revealed the many ways she “survived” before she made it big.
“I had to go strip. I had to go, ‘Oh yes, let us go back to this hotel’. And I drugged up and robbed them,” she confessed in the footage. “That’s what I used to do. Nothing was handed to me. Nothing! I’m a good-hearted person but I have done some bad things. You don’t have to worry about it as you all don’t get to tell my story,” she added.
Now, the ‘Invasion of Privacy’ star is breaking her silence on the comments she made in that video.
“I always speak my truth,” the 26-year-old Grammy winner wrote in a statement she uploaded to Instagram. “I always own my things. I’m seeing on social media that what I did three years ago has popped back up,” she began her post. “A live where I talked about things I had to do in my past right or wrong that I felt I needed to do to make a better living.”
She continued, “I never claim to be a perfect or come from a perfect world with a perfect past. I always speak my truth and I always own my things. I never glorified the things I brought up in that live I never even put those things in my music because I’m not proud of it and feel a responsibility not to glorify it. I made the choices that I did at the time because I had very limited options.”
The 26-year-old star explained as a “part of hip hop culture,” many musicians use their upbringings and struggles to “talk about the wrong things you had to do to get where you are.”
For her, she said she feels “blessed” to have come out of that situation, but knows that “many women have not.”
“Whether or not they were poor choices at the time, I did what you had to do to survive.” She clarified that the men she mentioned in her Instagram Live video were “men that I dated” and they were “conscious, willing and aware”.
She closed her statement, saying, “All I can do now is be a better me for myself, my family and my future.”