Nicki Minaj’s mother, Carol Maraj, recently told The Sun that her family witnessed domestic violence, according to Radar Online.
Maraj says she suffered abuse at the hands of Nicki’s father, Robert, in their Queens, New York home in the 1990s, a home he allegedly tried to burn down with her inside.
“My husband used to get high on cocaine and alcohol and would come home and terrorize the whole family,” Maraj says. “One night I woke up and smelled smoke. I went downstairs and the kitchen was on fire. I had to run out of the house and it burned to the ground.”
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According to Maraj, Nicki and her siblings were staying with a neighbor while the fire took place, but they also witnessed physical abuse on other occasions. Maraj says this took place on one occasion when she was trying to take her children to a neighbor’s house.
“He saw me get into the car and when it reached a stop light he pulled me out of the car, punched me in the face and kept pulling me and pulling me back towards the house,” she says. “Someone eventually came and saved me and he ran.”
On separate occasions, the children experienced abuse in other ways.
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“He was so violent,” Maraj explains. “He would threaten us and keep us up all night. My kids would be crying until he eventually passed out drunk. He would hit the children too, but that’s what they do in Trinidad, where he is from.”
Minaj discussed her father’s abuse in 2010, as reported by HipHopDX.
“He drank a lot and did drugs, and he would get violent when he did,” she said at the time. “When he set fire to the house, he was attempting to kill my mother. She got out before it burned all the way down. I’ve always had this female-empowerment thing in the back of my mind because I wanted my mother to be stronger, and she couldn’t be. I thought, ‘If I’m successful, I can change her life.'”
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In 2012, Nicki commended her father for changing his ways during an interview with The Guardian.
“He’s still with my mother,” she said. “He went to rehab and cleaned himself up. Eventually they started going to church a lot, and he got saved and started changing his life. He’s away from drugs now. He doesn’t instill fear in people any more.”
Despite this, however, Radar Online reports that Nicki’s father was arrested for drunk driving on October 18, 2013 and again on December 3, 2013. The site says Carol Maraj also had a restraining order filed against him him last year.
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