During a “Marriage or Mirage” appearance on September 11, Faith Evans revealed that she had no knowledge of Tupac being signed to Death Row Records when she agreed to collaborate with him. She also claimed that The Notorious B.I.G., whom she was married to at the time, gave her his blessings for the collaboration.
“I didn’t know ‘Pac was signed to Death Row, y’know what I’m sayin? Or I never would’ve agreed to do a song with him,” she began. “When I went to the studio with ‘Pac, when I met him, he said: ‘I wanna do a song with you.’ I told Big, he said: ‘D’you wanna do it?’ I said: ‘Yeah, if he got the money.’”
Faith later revealed that she informed Biggie about everything after noticing her recording session was filled with people from Death Row.
However, Gene Deal, Diddy’s former bodyguard, contradicted Faith’s account, alleging that Biggie wouldn’t have agreed to the collaboration because everyone knew there was tension between Tupac-Biggie and Bad Boy-Death Row at the time.
“Everybody knows that at [the] time when Pac did the VIBE Magazine thing, Pac wasn’t digging Biggie. When he came home the whole nine yards, he wasn’t messing with Biggie. Everybody knew that from the interview he gave from prison,” Deal said in a recent interview with The Art Of Dialogue.
“That doesn’t sound like Biggie would say that because he had a problem with [Tupac] and I know he had a problem with [Tupac] because I was there when he confronted Faith about [Tupac].”
Gene Deal then recounted the moment when Biggie confronted Faith aggressively about working with the “California Love” rapper.
“When we got to Philly [for the tour,] Faith was in Philly. We were doing a show in Philly and we were right there, Biggie saw her and he just grabbed her by her throat and Puff [Daddy] told me to stop it. ‘Yo Gene stop that,’ and I was about to stop it and then D-Rock came and said ‘Yo Gene that’s that man’s wife.’ And I said ‘You’re right, that is his wife.’ Then he pulled her into the room and that was it.”
“Everybody in hip hop knew that it was a Death Row-Bad Boy incident way before the tour. Way before we got on that tour… way before we got on the Naughty By Nature tour, we knew that there was a problem with Death Row and Tupac and them. So even the people around her knew that. But that’s Faith’s story. She’s the only one that didn’t know it. She’s telling it like she wants to tell it and there’s nothing we can do about that.
“I believe she believes her story. But I don’t believe her story,” Gene concluded.
Watch the clip above.
Faith Evans was initially slated to feature on Tupac’s 1996 single “Wonda Why They Call U B—ch” from the album “All Eyez On Me.” However, Pac had to remove her vocals from the song after Bad Boy, both Biggie and Faith’s label at the time, did not approve of the collaboration.
By then, rumors of an affair between 2Pac and Evans had already been circulating. Pac further fueled the rumors in his diss track “Hit Em Up” where he claimed to have had relations with Faith. “You claim to be a player/But I f—-ed your wife,” he rapped in the song’s opening line.
While Pac may have been explicit in his lyrics, Faith revealed in a 2014 interview with VladTV that the California rapper did proposition her for sex when she went to the studio to record.
“I went to the studio, I realized there were a bunch of Death Row people there, so kind of in my mind I started figuring it out right there,” she said. “I didn’t think that was a good look just because of the fact of the Suge and Puff situation [at the 1995 Source Awards].
“Even though I didn’t really know a lot of the details about what happened, but it was clear he took a jab at Puff at the Source Awards and stuff like that. But I was pretty oblivious to the things that had gone on prior to that, until probably a few years later.”
Evans then went to 2Pac’s hotel to collect the $25,000 she was getting paid for the collaboration and that’s where she said the proposition took place.
“He asked in a very surprising and offensive way for sure,” she explained. “By that time it was pretty clear to me, it seemed to me that that was kind of like a plan. I kind of allowed myself to be played and allow myself to get into this situation because this is totally not how I operate, that ain’t how I do business and that was never up for discussion as far as that being an exchange. That’s not what it was about.”
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