It’s been a long 26 years since the hip-hop industry lost a legend and the true godfather of gangsta rap. Like it or love it, the genre changed the game for good and Eazy muthaf—– E was at the forefront of its movement. His departure from the industry and this earth was one that turned many a head and baffled more, as he was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS only weeks after being admitted to the hospital for a cough.
Eazy’s daughter, Ebie, is on a mission to unearth the truth about her father’s death via an investigative documentary entitled “The Mysterious Death of Eazy E,” along with her mother, Tracy Jernigan. She recently shared her perspective during an exclusive interview.
What prompted you to do investigative series on your own and do it this way?
This is something that I’ve been talking about for maybe 15 years and it actually wasn’t my idea at all. It was my mother, Tracy Jernigan’s idea. It started off as it simply being her story, and really trying to tell all the things that she experienced [in] her relationship with my father. Even her friendship with my father at the time of his death and her court dealings after he passed away — everything she experienced up until the time she came up with the idea of doing the documentary. And at that point, I was old enough to kind of understand that something definitely fishy happened with my father. That’s when she brought me in, as well as my sister Erica.
What is it that you want people to know? What’s the biggest conspiracy theory out there that just doesn’t sit right with you?
I don’t think any of them sit right with me because they overshadow the truth. And that’s a problem for me. When you have big names like Suge Knight and Jerry Heller, and they kind of [throw] the blame on them. I really know what I experienced and my mother was there and knows what went down. It’s really frustrating for the public to only focus on those things and those particular people.
What was most difficult about being in those moments and asking the questions that you had to ask to get the answers that you needed to get?
I’m not afraid of knowing anything. I am very driven. I’m very passionate. Obviously, you got to have big balls to do something like this and that is me. I get that from both of my parents. The hardest part to me [is that] I am emotional. I have an emotional attachment. I have a lot of pain. I have a lot of trauma that people don’t understand or know about. And so when I’m having conversations about my father, even like now, I just automatically start to get emotional. But also getting that confirmation of things that I thought or kind of knew, just through my own digging, or my mother’s digging … it’s just painful [and] traumatic. But it’s also exciting in a sense that I feel like I’m getting somewhere and I’m getting to the bottom of this.
“The Mysterious Death of Eazy E airs Thursdays at 10pm EST on WE tv.
