*Jermaine Dupri and Janet Jackson sparked speculation that they are back together after the hip-hop mogul was spotted at the singer’s Atlanta stop of her “Together Again” tour last month.
Dupri touched on the subject earlier this month at the Lovers & Friends festival. Speaking backstage to HipHopDX, the outlet asked him what he and Janet, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, Nelly and Ashanti “all have in common?”.
Dupri noted that they are “All exes,” and seemingly shut down rumors that he and Jackson have rekindled the romance like Affleck and J.Lo did last year. Jackson and JD dated for nearly eight years before calling it quits in 2009 after he cheated on her.
Dupri previously opened up about his relationship with Jackson during a 2020 interview with rapper T.I. for his podcast expediTIously. Dupri unpacked how he and the superstar met and what caused them to part ways.
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“We met at her concert at The Omni [Coliseum]. Kris Kross came… This is when Jermaine Dupri was just a producer. I wasn’t nobody. I didn’t have no record out yet or nothing. Nobody knew me besides what I did for Kris [Kross] and Xscape,” Dupri explained.
“We go to her show and I’m part of their entourage… Kris Kross goes in to meet Janet Jackson, and the bodyguard hit me with the hand. So they’re like ‘That’s our man!’ They’re telling her, and when they tell her, she had to vouch for me, ‘Let him in, he cool.’ When I came in, it was almost like the Diana Ross concert. She started talking to me ‘You must be the special one… Why they ain’t wanna leave you outside? Why they didn’t want to leave you outside?’ … It seemed like an energy, right? At that point I was just like, I’m gonna see you again.’ This is Kris time. I’m going to just play my role,” he continued.
J.D. also shared how he exposed Janet to parts of Black culture she hadn’t experienced while living in the “Jackson Bubble”.
“I took her to Magic City. I exposed her to a lot of life that I didn’t even know I could expose a person to. You think when a person is that famous, that rich, they know everything. They’ve seen everything. But it was a lot of world that we was living in, cultural wise, that they hadn’t gotten in L.A. That’s where we basically started hitting it off. We were showing each other multiple things. It was two cool people exchanging energy,” he explained.
The So So Def founder then revealed how their relationship ended.
“I started seeing so many other things that I wanted to do, and so many other places that I wanted to go. I started thinking like marriage for me wasn’t gonna work. Just, something about it. When you feel like you’re ready to get married, you don’t have no answers, you just know what it is. I was in the space. I’m not gon front and say that I wasn’t. I felt married… I think the only thing that created a difference for me was the fact that we didn’t live together,” he shared.
“We had an eight year, nine year relationship, but we didn’t live with each other… I feel like that’s a part where you really determine if you’re strong. She wasn’t willing to move to Atlanta. She was willing to come out here for a couple of weeks. But living in Atlanta, for her, just didn’t really seem like L.A. I wasn’t ready to move to Malibu… I like it, I f*ck with it. but it aint… It’s just something about being here. That stuff didn’t feel like the space where either one of us wanted to be,” Dupri explained.
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READ MORE: Jermaine Dupri Dishes About Relationship with Janet Jackson And Why They Called it Quits [VIDEO]
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