Nicki Minaj once warned her drug-addicted father, who set their house on fire while her mother was inside, what she would do if she became famous

Nicki Minaj, before she became one of the fiercest and brashest rap-pop icons on the planet, had sailed through a horrific childhood, hoping to get rich and famous someday. Long before her recent praise for flashing her famous back from US President Donald Trump, with whom she had flown on Air Force One to a Republican campaign rally in Michigan, she opened up about her childhood abuse.

The Trinidadian-born rapper was 27 when, in an interview with Rolling Stone, she spoke her mind on his abusive father, who used to beat up her mother.

When she started to achieve mainstream pop stardom, she said to the outlet what it was like when she first came to America. “I would go in my room and kneel down at the foot of my bed and pray that god would make me rich so that I could take care of my mother,” she told the outlet in November 2010.


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Other than her father Robert Maraj’s identity as a financial executive, the drug addict man was so violent that he once set their house on fire when her mother was inside it.

And Minaj talked about when she will become rich and famous and how she would avenge his father's behavior and also warned the other drug addicts. “Maybe one day your daughter will be famous and talk to every magazine about it, so think about that, dads out there who want to be crazy.”

That time, the couple was living together, and she shared that her father was not comfortable with her sharing all these stories with the public. “It’s the price you pay when you abuse drugs and alcohol,” she said.

The Beauty And A Beat singer spoke at length with the British paper The Sun in 2011 about how she lived in fear of her father, “All of my young and teenage early years we lived in fear that my mother would be killed by my father,” according to Huffington Post.

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“It was ridiculous... It was very tough emotionally for me to have a parent who was an alcoholic and a drug addict... My father was violent - physically and verbally,” she added.

However, it is believed that the two reconciled and that Maraj went to rehab. “He went to rehab and cleaned himself up. Eventually (her parents) started going to church a lot, and he got saved and started changing his life,” she told The Guardian in 2012. “He's away from drugs now. He doesn't instill fear in people anymore.”

Robert Maraj died in a car accident on February 13, 2021, and in May, she penned a letter to her fans, terming it “the most devastating loss” of her life. “I find myself wanting to call him all the time. More so now that he’s gone. Life is funny that way. May his soul rest in paradise. He was very loved & will be very missed,” Billboard quoted from her letter.