A violent gun battle, a prison sentence, and millions owed to creditors. Turns out,
the shocking rap lyrics Lil’ Kim was spitting were true.
Keep watching for the devastating story behind her success.
"I never know what I'm gonna do next. It's like a God-given gift that I have."
Given her position
as the OG Queen Bee of '90s hip hop, Lil' Kim has always appeared to be unbreakable. But while the
"Hard Core" MC sure knows how to front, she has suffered from poor self-esteem all of her life.
As the Washington Post noted, Kim grew up in what she called a "white neighborhood"
where she was made to feel ugly by kids who teased her. The bullying sadly proved
to be the start of a pattern of abuse that further destroyed her self-worth.
As she got older, she was often belittled by men, telling Newsweek,
"To this day when someone says I'm cute, I can't see it.
I don't see it no matter what anybody says."
Thankfully, Kim found some power within her rap persona. And as she told the Post,
"I got to dress up in expensive clothes,
and I got to look like a movie star or whatever. I think doing photo shoots
and seeing all the people respond to me has helped. [But] I still don't see what they see."
Lil' Kim's childhood
wasn't exactly a nurturing one. Long before she joined up with Brooklyn's Junior M.A.F.I.A., Kim
admitted to having a deeply troubled relationship with her father. As she recalled to Newsweek,
"It was like I could do nothing right.
Everything about me was wrong — my hair, my clothes, just me."
Adding to the tension was the violence that Kim alleged her father committed against her mom.
She told The Washington Post,
"There was a great deal of verbal abuse.
And there was one time when my mother had black eyes. My father told people she had fallen."
Unfortunately, the trouble didn't end there. The rapper confessed to having endured abuse
at the home of a family member when she was a child. And as she grew up,
Kim would further struggle to find a safe place that she could call home.
"I went through a lot and I'm still tryin' to hold on."
Lil' Kim's parents split in the early
'80s, causing even more upheaval in their home. According to The Washington Post, Kim, her mom,
and her brother initially stayed with friends. But as Kim's mom, Ruby Mae, told the outlet,
"I was basically living out of the trunk of my car. So I let Kim go to live with her father."
But Kim's relationship with her father was so volatile
that the rapper was living on the streets by age 14. As she recalled to the Los Angeles Times,
"I've fought a lot on the streets because I had to. When you're on the streets, people
feel like they can do anything to you because you've got nothing and don't have anybody."
Kim was able to mend her relationship with her father, as an adult. He passed away in 2019.
At 17, Lil' Kim would be discovered by
Biggie Smalls. And the legendary rapper — better known as The Notorious B.I.G. — would become
her friend and also her lover. But while the relationship was beneficial for Kim in many ways,
it also mirrored her dark past. In 2017, music producer Jermaine Dupri even alleged
to "Drink Champs" that Smalls once pulled a gun on Kim during a recording session.
Kim has also confirmed that her relationship with Smalls was violent,
describing one experience on "The Diamond K Show"
in which Smalls choked her until she lost consciousness. Then, in 1996, Kim even
terminated a pregnancy when she discovered she was expecting Smalls' child. She told The Source,
"I already knew the kind of relationship that Biggie and I had,
and I knew that [having a child] was something that couldn't take place."
Lil' Kim suggests that past bad relationships
led to her eventual desire for cosmetic procedures. Claiming that previous partners
had left her to be with women who typically had European features, she told Newsweek,
"Being a regular Black girl wasn't good enough."
But a few years later, she appeared to have flipped her position.
Though the rapper admitted to Angie Martinez that she may have gone a little overboard,
Kim also denied that she did it because of "low self-esteem." She did confirm, however,
that she had a nose job after an abusive ex violently attacked her and broke it.
Aside from that, Kim says she was striving to achieve a certain beauty standard for
herself — and it may have been an impossible one. Whatever the reason,
it was her choice to make. And as she told Newsweek,
"It was to make me look the way I wanted to look. It's my body."
They certainly had their challenges,
but Lil' Kim looks back on her relationship with Biggie Smalls with fondness. In 1997, she suffered
a shocking loss when the rapper was killed in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. As Kim recounted
following the shooting, Biggie's death impacted her in multiple ways. He had been her friend
and mentor, as well as a key factor in helping to shape her success. She told Rolling Stone,
"Biggie easily accounts for 85% of my career."
The hip-hop star then poured her grief into her second album, "The Notorious K.I.M.,"
in tribute to the late rapper. But working through her heartache in an industry where
echoes of Biggie were everywhere proved to be more difficult for Kim than she anticipated.
It forced her to grow up, and it also pushed her to evolve from artist to entrepreneur.
"I could feel him when I was writing, 'cuz
sometimes the pen would be movin' and I wouldn't even be movin' it."
She explained to the Los Angeles Times,
"Working on the album without Biggie was the hardest thing I ever had to do.
You can't imagine what I've gone through working on this album. I had to take on
all the responsibilities that I never, ever imagined. I just wanted to be an artist."
Though Biggie Smalls undoubtedly
facilitated some aspects of Lil' Kim's career, some wondered just how much control the Queen
Bee actually had in regard to her image. Since her 1996 breakout with the album "Hard Core,"
fans and critics have often questioned Kim's influence over her own provocative persona.
"More is more."
As Washington Post writer Asha Bandele argued,
"She's just like every little abused girl that I knew growing up.
I do not believe that Kim is in control of her image because there's nothing powerful about it,
nothing rounded, nothing human. It's a caricature. […] We're so much more complicated than that."
Biggie Smalls' mom, Voletta Wallace, countered that Kim needed to allow fans to see her
authentic self, not her show persona. So was there something that was holding her back?
"I was like, 'I'm about to spice up the party.' I'm about to come in,
like, 'Yeah! The Queen has arrived!'"
In the book "The Motherlode," Pitchfork reported that record producer Lance "Un" Rivera had a plan
when shaping Kim's image as the "side chick" and not "the wife." He said,
"It's all driven by the male ego, the fantasy. It's not about love.
It's about being nasty. […] [But] she [also] wrote the majority of the album."
Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown
have been engaged in a seemingly everlasting feud. As XXL noted, the two ferocious female
MCs came from similar beginnings. The two briefly attended the same high school together,
and their impressive debut albums were dropped within a week of one another.
By all accounts, they seemed friendly… until they weren't.
Brown's cousin, music producer Clark Kent, pretty much summed it up, telling the outlet,
"All of a sudden, they just we ren't cool."
Attacks subsequently volleyed back and forth between the two in the form of several diss
tracks. Lil' Kim fired some brutal shots on songs like "The Notorious K.I.M." and
Lil Cease's "Play Around," and Brown sniped back with tracks like Capone-N-Noreaga's "Bang Bang."
The rivalry culminated in a violent "gun battle" between their respective entourages, which The
New York Times suggested was the result of a beef between the two. It all served to distract from
the ground-breaking legacy of both artists. And sadly, the squabbles didn't end there.
"Bein' a woman in this industry, women can be so catty."
Enter notoriously outspoken rapper Nicki Minaj and her array of suspiciously Lil' Kim-esque looks.
According to NME, Kim accused Minaj of swiping her image and artwork for her own — an allegation
that was hard to argue against when Kim posted the visual receipts on Twitter.
Minaj appeared to diss Kim on the track "Roman's Revenge," and Kim then blatantly retaliated with
a bit of artwork appearing to depict Minaj's decapitated head, according to Entertainment
Weekly. It appears that, no matter the decade, women fighting other women still makes great bank.
The gunfight said to have stemmed from
Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown's alleged feud had very real consequences. Four years after the incident,
Kim was found guilty of "lying to investigators and to a federal grand jury" with MTV News
reporting that Kim made different claims to what the evidence proved. The incident saw her
co-manager Damion Butler and Junior M.A.F.I.A. member Suif "C-Gutta" Jackson later confessing
to firing on rap group Capone-N-Noreaga outside the New York radio station Hot 97.
Kim claimed her manager Butler wasn't with her at the time and she couldn't ID a photo
of a man thought to be involved — who turned out to be "C-Gutta." But witness testimony
and security camera footage suggested otherwise. She was later sentenced to
a year and a day in prison and fined $50,000, according to Billboard. It
was a small price to pay considering she actually faced up to 20 years behind bars.
Luckily, Kim soon found a silver lining amidst the whole experience.
She recounted on MTV's "RapFix Live" how she was welcomed by fans on the inside. She said,
"[I was] greeted with open arms by a lot of wonderful, wonderful girls.
I met a lot of good people in there who are still my friends to this day."
"I met some of my closest friends in prison. I learned so much about friendship."
She also used the time to pump the brakes on what she described as "nonstop" work,
prior to heading in. She recalled to MTV News,
"I never slept for two months straight. When I got there, I kind of just collapsed."
A few years after returning home
from her prison stint, Lil' Kim faced a brand new obstacle. According to court documents acquired
by The Blast, the rapper filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in 2018 and was reported to have owed
creditors roughly $4 million. She was allegedly late on "$1,845,451 in back taxes alone."
The outlet added that the rapper's yearly income had been in steady decline since 2016,
later reporting that her house was set to be auctioned off to cover outstanding debt.
A year later, thankfully, the Queen Bee appeared to be firmly on top of her finances. The Blast
noted that court documents even showed Kim asking a federal judge to dismiss her bankruptcy case.
According to the outlet, the rapper filed for bankruptcy to save her New Jersey mansion from
foreclosure — and it worked. By July of 2019, Kim's bankruptcy case was officially dismissed,
with the rapper proudly demonstrating that she
had her Benjamins in order and was on top of her repayments.
According to reports, as of 2021, Kim's net worth clocked in at roughly $500,000.
It's a comparatively slim figure for a woman of such prominence and influence.
And it's especially gutting, considering the fact that a rapper like Nicki Minaj — who owes
a great deal to her trail-blazing predecessor — has a net worth estimated to be $100 million.
"I mean I'm still the same person, but you have to be different."
These days, Lil' Kim is enjoying life as a proud mom to her daughter, Royal,
with her hubby, rapper Mr. Papers. And while she may be a music industry icon, as she closes
in on her fifties, it appears The Queen Bee is turning the page on a bright new chapter.
"Never forget where you come from."
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse,
you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233.
You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.