The split has been acrimonious to say the least, but Montana says he has no regrets about their time together. “I wouldn’t take nothing back. Everything comes to an end. Everything I’ve been through made me who I am. I definitely learned a lot of lessons. But if I could do it over, I’d do it over.”
Additionally, his ex-wife has been vocal in her criticisms of the Bad Boy rapper as a father. She’s blasted Montana on social media for being an absentee dad. Yet Montana believes that his own father’s lack of involvement in his life made him stronger.
“Fatherhood is important,” Montana concedes, before adding that he may have been better off because his dad wasn’t around. “When my father left, it kinda made me who I am. It was a good thing for me. It made me a man early. I feel like what he did was great for me. I still don’t hold no grudge against him. Maybe if he’d never left, I’d never [have] been French Montana.”
So to French Montana, all of those life experiences have gotten him here. He took a bullet to the back of his head years ago, and recalled the incident earlier this year during an interview with Jay-Z’s Life+Times website. “All I see is two n—-s, hammers at my head,” he said in January. “As soon as everybody started moving in on me, everybody ran. So I’m the only one stuck. I got shot, back of my head.”
That incident — as well as the several aforementioned others that would be benchmarks on the road to stardom — didn’t stop him. None of those hurdles have been able to beat him. “I feel like sometimes life puts you in a corner — where you got your back to the wall,” French explains. “And it makes you be somebody that you always thought you could be.”
“Back is against the wall, me against the world. That’s how it goes,” Montana added. “Usually those are the people that take it to the top. It could break you down — a lot of people can’t deal with that pressure.”
He looks over his sunglasses and shrugs, before adding: “Certain people can.”
