When it comes to Keke Palmer‘s past relationship with Darius Jackson, she calls it a “toxic dynamic.” In a cover story on The Cut, she revealed she’d initially made excuses for her ex when he’d allegedly abused her during their two years together.
“You can say, ‘I know you’re not like that,’ or ‘I know it’s not like this,’ or ‘I know you’re a good person deep down.’ You can make so many excuses for behavior that could have stopped,” said Palmer, who notes she hated when word spread about her relationship and worried how it would affect her brand.
“It was my personal junk. It didn’t deserve a place in the center of something that I worked very hard to make encouraging and empowering,” Palmer said. “When it was happening, it was horrible because I could not get to the message of the story, in real time. Now, I’m able to articulate it, and I’m able to say what the story will be.”
Keke credits the birth of son Leodis for giving her the courage to end the relationship “before it had the chance of becoming something that I had to survive.” Keke is now co-parenting with Darius, after being granted a restraining order in 2024 that protects her against the domestic violence she’d allegedly been facing.
Elsewhere in the story, Keke talks about taking music into her own hands because labels didn’t know how to market her.
“I’m talented, I can sing, I can perform, I can do all that, but knowing how to present that to the world, there’s still an art to that,” she said. “My experience with labels taught me that I had to figure that out because they weren’t able to really help me with it.”
Palmer’s movie One of Them Days with SZA arrives Friday.
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