Both Janet Jackson and Jermaine Dupri have remained mostly mum about their seven-year relationship that put them on the list as one of the entertainment’s most esteemed power couples, but now the latter has opened up about how he was able to bag the Pleasure Principle singer.
On a recent episode of the Million Dollaz Worth of Game podcast, the So So Def record executive was asked, “how did you pull Janet man? How the f*ck do you pull somebody on that level?”
“It wasn’t about no music shit,” Dupri told the show’s hosts, Wallo and Gillie Da Kid. “I was just on some like hang out. I wasn’t on no music shit, though. I never wanted to produce for her. We got in an argument about me not producing for her because she was around me watching everybody else get hit records.”
He continued: “I never wanted her to think that’s what my agenda was. ’Cause so many people was saying that… When Janet met me she got picked up from the airport in a [Bentley] Continental T. It wasn’t never no situation where I wanted her to believe that I was trying to do this.”
According to the 50-year-old North Carolina native, he said he was meticulous about courting her because he didn’t want to “mess up.” When the pair were first seen out together, she was in a longtime business relationship with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the iconic producers behind her classic 1986 hit album, Control.
“You don’t need me, but in her eyes…It didn’t sound right,” Dupri recalled when he asked Jackson to work with him on some music. He admitted that he hesitated to work with her in the beginning, which caused “a little bit” of a fracture in their relationship. But eventually, they wound up working together on her 2006 album, 20 Y.O.
Dupri and Jackson became an item in 2002 and ended their union in 2009, primarily because neither wanted to move to the other’s respective city, Dupri said.
“I started seeing so many other things that I wanted to do and so many other places that I wanted to go,” the Money Ain’t a Thang rapper told T.I. on his expediTIously podcast.
“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. We had an eight-year, nine-year relationship, but we didn’t live with each other.”
But last year, Dupri confessed that the pair broke up because she caught him cheating.
“One of the weird things about dating Janet is that dating Janet attracts other women,” he said on Lifetime’s four-part documentary about the entertainment icon. “Girls wanted to talk to me more because I was dating her, which was really weird…and uhh, just ya know…I was a man.”
