Gucci Mane is being criticized for praising wife Keyshia Ka’oir for staying with him through his past incarceration, infidelities, and drug abuse.
On Monday, the rapper (né Radric Davis) posted a meme to Instagram featuring a photo from his 2017 wedding to the beauty mogul with the words, “Everyone want this, but what y’all forget was she was with wild Gucci, cheating Gucci, in jail Gucci, publicity with other women Gucci. This is Gucci after therapy/rehabilitation. This is a street man groomed in his 30’s after he’s been at his lowest point. Point is, this is a rider who knew what she signed up for! You bitches is with the next n— after couples fight …”
In the caption of the photo, Gucci, 39, wrote, “I love my wife she stayed down!” And in the comments section, Ka’oir, 34, wrote, “Awwwwww LOVE u more my baby! There’s nothing in this world that I wouldn’t do for you Papi.”
While some commenters praised Ka’oir for her loyalty, others didn’t react as fondly to Gucci’s post. As one user commented, “She [definitely] stayed down and love is love, but that doesn’t mean any woman should have to tolerate that in order to get a good dude.”
Another user shared a similar sentiment by writing, “Black women don’t need to be intimate with pain and suffering as a condition of love. And I still love y’all but that fact needs to be said.” And yet another commented, “Women shouldn’t have to suffer to have a man show them honesty, love, and respect them in a relationship. And then you repost this and women out here thinking this is what they have to do to have a man call them wife. Ummm… okay Gucci.”
“Stop glorifying disrespect as a right of passage,” one user added. “This is all fine and dandy but what we need to stop doing is normalize the idea of a woman going through hell and back w/ a man to gain a wedding ring, a monogamous relationship, etc. and we especially need to stop doing this in the black community. To anyone reading this, anybody who genuinely loves you won’t continuously hurt you. and that’s just that on that!”
Though one user said they’re “here for healthy Gucci,” they want people to “stop praising ‘struggle love.'” Another even went on to question, “Would you have stayed with her if she had done the same to you?”
Gucci has previously been open about the harrowing trials he put Ka’oir through during his time in jail and as a result of his drug use (especially his addiction to “lean,” which is a prescription cough syrup), recalling in his 2017 memoir, The Autobiography of Gucci Mane, that he screamed at her two weeks after he’d been arrested and put in an isolation cell in 2013, “Why the f— haven’t you come down here and bonded me out yet?”
He then went on to serve three years for illegal possession of a firearm before being released on May 26, 2016. (After serving a 90 day jail sentence on cocaine-related charges in 2001, Gucci was arrested multiple times throughout the years, including in 2005 on a murder charge for which he maintained he shot someone in self-defense; the charge was later dropped.)
“Keyshia had good reason to not want to help me out,” he wrote in the book of his life-changing last arrest. “I’d gone crazy on her, first privately on the phone when she’d tried to talk me off the ledge and then on Twitter. But that wasn’t why Keyshia hadn’t come to bond me out. She’d taken every one of my phone calls since my arrest. Her phone bill was ridiculous from all my collect calls. Despite everything, she still wanted to help me. But Keyshia couldn’t get me out of jail.”
While he revealed that this final stint in prison transformed him for the better (he went through withdrawal and lost almost 80 lbs. to impress Ka’oir), his evolution had been a long time coming.
The couple first met when Ka’oir was featured in a video in 2010. Ka’oir told Fader that she was originally hesitant to go out with the rapper, but she eventually agreed to a date. Gucci, on the other hand, was in love with her “on sight.”
In his book, Gucci also admitted that he did try to “downplay” his “vices” to Ka’oir because she didn’t do drugs. Before his last arrest, he wrote that “I’d promised her I was done drinking lean, which was a lie, but as long as I stayed on point and didn’t let things spiral out of control she would have no reason not to believe me.”
But his life eventually did spin out of control, and Ka’oir was there for him daily during his difficult journey to health. (He wrote that he was taken in for psychiatric evaluation while in jail and also discussed his “paranoia” and depression.)
“Gucci has always meant a lot to me. A lot of times, I feel like he’s misunderstood,” Ka’oir told Fader about the reason she stayed with the rapper while he was in jail. “I know that I’m one of the few people that really understands him. I was his biggest support system, and no matter what he goes through I’m going to be there for him. Why would I turn my back on him now?”
Eventually, it clicked for Gucci.
“For so long I’d felt like I’d been dealt a bad hand,” Gucci wrote of his initial reaction to being in jail again. “But prison is a humbling experience. It was hell in there and over time that made me start to appreciate all my blessings on the outside. I had a damn good life waiting for me.”
He listed the blessings in his life he cherishes the most: his career, his son Bam (from a previous relationship), and Ka’oir.
Gucci popped the question to Ka’oir at an Atlanta Hawks game in November 2016 and the tried and true couple tied the knot in an extravagant $1.7 million wedding in Miami in 2017.
“I had Keyshia, my first real love. The first woman I ever wanted to bring to a red carpet and let the world know this was my lady,” he wrote. “She held me down the whole time I was locked up and showed me what it means to have somebody you can truly count on. I wanted to be able to return the favor.”
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