Faith Evans has shared an alternate angle to the East Coast–West Coast Hip Hop rivalry of the mid-90s, revealing that The Notorious B.I.G wasn’t on the offense as much as people think.
Evans was married to Biggie, but their relationship was beginning to fizzle out during the peak of the rapper’s beef with 2Pac. The feud further escalated when she collaborated with ‘Pac on a song and was even photographed next to him, which led to rumors of them having an affair.
AD LOADING...
The California All-Star subsequently doubled down on this when he dropped the knockout diss track, “Hit ’Em Up,” on which took aim at Big with he scathing opening line: “I fucked your bitch, you fat muthafucka.”
During a Marriage or Mirage appearance on Monday (September 11), Faith Evans set the record straight on her involvement in the ordeal and some of the details surrounding it.
AD LOADING...
“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.’”
Upon noticing that her recording session was full of people on the Death Row team, Evans explained that she immediately noticed something was off even though she wasn’t fully tuned into the conflict.
AD LOADING...
“I didn’t hide anything,” she clarified. “I told my husband.”
Watch the 50-year-old veteran discuss getting pulled into the beef at the 22:10 mark below:
Elsewhere in the show, the former Bad Boy artist opened up about what she loved about her late husband.
“Everything. I loved everything about him,” she began. “He was honest. You understand? One thing about him, even at that young age… honest! Yo, I respect it. I’m like, I can’t take nothing else.”
She went on to recall a time when she asked Biggie, “Did you fuck her?” and he admitted it, rather than lie. Big was “honest as fuck,” she added, before revealing: “Most of the time I didn’t know what was going on but when I did and I asked him, he told the truth.”
It was love at first sight for the pair who married rather quickly after meeting at a promotional photoshoot for Bad Boy Records in 1994.
AD LOADING...
“I married her after knowing her eight days and I was happy. That was my baby,” Biggie once told VIBE. “At the same time, with us being so spontaneous, we did it backwards.”
The iconic rapper behind “Hypnotize” and “Big Poppa” died on March 9, 1997 at the age of 24. He was survived by Evans and their son, CJ Wallace, as well as his daughter T’yanna, who he had with his high school sweetheart, Jan Jackson.
