Baton Rouge, Louisiana, rapper Kevin Gates stopped by “Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson” recently, where he and the former heavyweight champion shared similar childhood experiences that changed their lives forever and helped develop them into the people they are now.
During the podcast interview, the “2 Phones” hitmaker made a stunning revelation when he was asked what made him decide to become a rapper.
“It was an escape for me,” Gates explained. “And I never said this in no interview or no podcast or anything like that. I grew up real, real violent and real aggressive. Not because I wanted to be, but I was molested when I was a child. So, I had this fear of being vulnerable. I took every kind of martial arts you could take. I even boxed. I did everything.
“I wanted to be the toughest person on earth. But writing and making music was always an escape for me. I never had the nuts to come out and say that. This is my first time saying this today,” he said.
Mike Tyson then told Gates he could relate with everything he said because he also was molested as a child.
“I know that route, too. Why do you think I became the meanest mother—— on the planet? Somebody did something to me, and I didn’t want it to happen again, so I became this guy,” said Iron Mike.
During an interview with ESPN’s “E:60” in 2017, Tyson revealed that he was sexually assaulted at the age of 7.
“Well I don’t like to talk about that, I like to keep that where it was in the past, but I was molested as a child. It made me have to be tough for the world I lived in. It was no one’s business to know, people just don’t talk about it because to some people they believe it’s demasculating [sic] them,” Tyson stated at the time.
Check out the full interview with Kevin Gates on “Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson” below. The two discuss their childhood traumas around the 4:30 mark.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT-kUv_J1rE[/embedyt]
