Just days after celebrating the blessed birth of Meek Mill, her current boo/Drake’s chew toy, Nicki Minaj was hit with a lawsuit by her long-term ex—and still-aspiring MC—Safaree Samuels, who claimed he was “physically and emotionally abused” during their relationship.
Put yourself in Nicki’s shoes: You’re one of hip-hop’s most powerful women. You’re consistently placed alongside Beyoncé and Rihanna in some of the world’s most stupefying rounds of Marry, Fuck, Kill. Drake has a huge crush on you, and you probably made Taylor Swift cry. But despite all of these accomplishments, you’re consistently undermined by your Achilles’ heel: men with alliterative names. Such was the case this week, when Minaj took to Twitter to air her grievances, “Tweeted on the 5th that the 6th was my baby’s bday. Celebrated on the 6th for his bday (publicly). Served w/a lawsuit on the 9th. lol.” She continued, “Two years later this poor excuse of a man is suing me & claiming to have been physically & emotionally abused. Lol. He’s so miserable.”
Nicki, who has always #blessed us with extensive Twitter sprees, went on to claim that Samuels’s lawsuit is just more proof that he’s so not over her. “You can’t even celebrate your happiness anymore w/o being victimized. Miserable ppl refuse to move on w/their lives,” she went on. “My man asked him to stop emailing me. I also asked him several times. This man can’t move on. It’s really sad. I have the emails to prove it…LIKE I CANT EVEN CELEBRATE MY MAN BDAY W/O THIS MISERABLE SON OF A BITCH TRYING TO EXTORT ME!!!!!” Meek Mill (alias: “my man”) hasn’t actually weighed in on the still-unfolding beef, presumably because Minaj doesn’t want him to embarrass himself.
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Even the most die-hard Minaj fans will admit that the Samuels era is shrouded in mystery. While the two dated on and off for 12 years, Minaj hardly ever addressed the relationship in public. In a GQ interview last year, Minaj explained why she was dating on the DL: “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. So after you do that for ten years it becomes something you feel like you have to do. It’s difficult to break out of that box. So I just vowed to myself, ‘Look, I’m about to put out a new album, I don’t care anymore.’ It just so happens I’m in a new relationship but I was planning on doing that before I was with Meek, because now it’s to the point where it’s different.”
According to Minaj, she and Samuels were close friends long before they took their relationship to the next level. But in the public eye, Safaree looked more like an assistant than a leading man. No wonder Nicki’s ex is offended by Minaj and Mill’s social media-heavy love affair, which is about as private as a Hulk Hogan sex tape. In one of his many post break-up interviews, Safaree told The Breakfast Club that he ended the relationship because Nicki’s secrecy had him feeling some type of way: “I like to have my arm around my chick. I want to be outside and be like, ‘I’m with my chick!’ I don’t want to have to be walking a couple steps behind you or a couple steps away from you and acting like you’re not my girl. After a while, that can put a strain on somebody. That definitely did something to me.”
Never one to take the high road (or delegate his Twitter account), Meek Mill decided to call Samuels out. Although his @’s got lost in the shade storm of Drakegate, hip-hop historians will recall this lesser-known Twitter tirade from last July (better known as the summer of Meek Mill’s discontent). Mill reserved some of his least coherent homophobic slurs for Samuels, tweeting, “This nigga SB was twerking mannnnnnn…i always thought u was gay letting Ya girl do all that shit with niggas while yall were together! Lol.” Safaree quickly countered, claiming that Minaj was still sliding into his AOL inbox: “Show him the email you sent me on my birthday. If were not 2gthr u shouldnt be questioning me about old shit at all. thats not moving on.”
Between Nicki Minaj and Hillary Clinton, it’s safe to say that email scandals are totally having a comeback.
Samuels proceeded to bring out the big guns: a Nicki Minaj diss track. Ooo, scary! “Lifeline,” an unexpected and unrequested follow-up to his first Minaj-centric single, “Love the Most,” featured a few minor gossip bombs. In addition to making fun of Meek Mill and bragging about his own dick size, “Lifeline” also boasted more half-rhymes than a middle school poetry assignment. In his quest to diss Meek and Minaj, Samuels only succeeded in proving that he was not over Nicki, and couldn’t afford to hire Drake’s ghostwriters.
Given Samuels’s sore loser ex-boyfriend M.O., this lawsuit is no surprise.
Last November, TMZ reported that Samuels was filing against Minaj for unpaid royalties, claiming that he was a crucial collaborator on some of her greatest hits. In light of this new Twitter turn, Samuels’s camp told Billboard that “Initially things were being handled privately behind the scenes but it was taken to social media and unfortunately it’s now being played out in the public eye which could easily be interpreted as a cry for attention. Safaree will not continue in any more social media feuds and at this time we are unable to comment or provide any details pertaining to the current legal proceedings that are taking place with Safaree Samuels and Nicki Minaj. We are confident that things will be both favorable and amicable for all parties.”
All in all, it seems like we might have 12 more years of Samuels-Minaj squabbling in store. If it’s any consolation, Nicki, we know a sensitive Canadian rapper—who can actually rap!—with a very buff shoulder for you to cry on.
