Nelly‘s episode of MTV Cribs in the early 2000s was a fan favorite – but it turned out to be a nightmare for him personally.
Appearing on the J. Cruz Show on Real 92.3 in Los Angeles last week, the St. Louis native revealed he had to get rid of the house shortly afterward because everyone figured out where he lived.
“I sold it. I had to get rid of it. That was the worst thing I did being on MTV Cribs because [people figured out where I lived],” he explained. “When we did it, I’m thinking this is my end-all, be-all. I’m not knowing that we’re just getting started as a group and we were gonna keep having success and things like that.”
He continued: “So when I did it, there was no gate on the house and people were pulling their boats up to the dock. My mom is out by the pool and a muthafucka will pull their boat up to the dock, walk up the dock and y’all don’t know my mom, but my mom is off the chain. So yeah, I had to…we moved, we got gates and shit after that.”
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The conversation happens around the 11-minute mark below.
Another classic episode of MTV Cribs was Redman‘s infamous 2001 episode – which has long been believed was faked.
To settle the debate, Thrillist chopped it up with the New Jersey native and the show’s creators a few years back to get their take on the episode that was in fact genuine.
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Nina L. Diaz, creator and executive producer of Cribs, first recalled Redman’s desire to want to show fans the reality of how he lived, not fabricate it for the cameras.
“Redman had the chops, the originality to want to really show how he lived,” Diaz says. “Other people would wait until they got this ballerific place to let us in because they had watched all these other ones like Master P, who was living in a gold Louisiana mansion. People saw that and they would say, ‘I’m not ready… You have to give me another year. I have to make some more bank.’”
With his crib, Redman wanted to portray the message that not every entertainer is rich.
“While everybody was trying to show a lavish house, the lavish life of living, that’s not always the case,” Redman says. “Not every entertainer’s living lavish. They may have a more lavish set on the street, but it’s still real for a lot of cats out here in the entertainment game. We’re okay, but we’re not rich, and that’s what I wanted to display to my fans… I always try and think about what the ‘hood would say when I do things.
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“It was supposed to be my first real-estate project,” Redman adds. “I bought the place for real cheap, and I was going to fix it up and rehab it and put it back on the market. But I ended up keeping it because I just loved the space, and I loved the seclusion of it.”
