Jada Pinkett Smith Says She Met Tupac Through Drug Dealing

Jada Pinkett Smith and Tupac Shakur met when they were both students at the Baltimore School for the Arts in the 1980s.

Pinkett Smith opened up about her relationship with Shakur on SiriusXM’s “Sway in The Morning” on Wednesday. 

“When I first met Pac, I was a drug dealer,” she revealed. “That’s how we started. 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.”

“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.”

The actress, who has been critical of the representation of their relationship in the Shakur biopic “All Eyez On Me,” has been candid that there was no physical chemistry between her and the late rapper, who died after a shooting in 1996.

And it might’ve been for the best. 

“If Pac and I had any kind of sexual chemistry, we might have killed each other because we were both so passionate,” she told Howard Stern back in 2015. “And you know, we loved deeply. It was hard enough with us just being friends. It was a volatile relationship.”