*According to Jada Pinkett Smith, late hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur suffered from alopecia but refused to reveal his condition publicly.
In a new interview with People, Pinkett Smith claims Pac started showing hair loss symptoms in 1991 after he was arrested for jaywalking by the Oakland Police Department in California.
“After he was in Northern California with the police officers that beat him up, he started losing his hair. And his alopecia patterns were far more extreme than mine,” Smith told People.
“I don’t think Pac ever talked about his alopecia, but he also looked really good with a bald head,” said Smith. “But that was during a time and during an era that you wouldn’t— he just wouldn’t talk about it.”
Per the Mayo Clinic, “Hair loss (alopecia) can affect just your scalp or your entire body, and it can be temporary or permanent. It can be the result of heredity, hormonal changes, medical conditions or a normal part of aging. Anyone can lose hair on their head, but it’s more common in men.”
Alopecia causes the immune system to attack hair follicles, causing hair loss.
As we previously reported, prior to the Oscars debacle that saw Jada’s husband Will Smith smacking presenter Chris Rock over a joke the comedian shared about Jada’s bald head, the actress had spoken out several times about her hair loss.
“I’m glad that I’ve had the opportunity and we’ll continue to have the opportunity to talk about how alopecia affects me,” she told People. “And I’m just hoping that it’ll give people the freedom to talk about how and just not have shame around it and not to have such a stigma. And there’s a lot of shame around alopecia.”
Meanwhile, during a recent interview on the “All the Smoke” podcast, Pinkett Smith said Tupac proposed to her while he was in jail in the 90s on Rikers Island, Insider reports.
“So when he asked me to get married, I knew at that time that he needed somebody to do time with him — which I was going to do anyway. You ain’t have to marry me to do time, I’m here,” Pinkett Smith said on the podcast.
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She added, “I think that for him, he just felt like, ‘Okay if I can tether myself, it’ll keep me on a trajectory.'”
READ MORE: Jada Pinkett Smith Reacts to Will’s Oscars Slap: ‘I Thought, ‘This is a Skit’
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