Nicki Minaj arranged for her dad to visit her in a final telephone call just hours before he was killed in a hit-and-run crash.
The musician’s father, Robert Maraj, died in February 2021 after being struck by a car in Mineola, New York. Minaj has now revealed they spoke shortly before the tragedy to organize a trip to California so he could meet her baby son for the first time.
“So right after I had the baby — and it was during corona — and nobody knew what was going on … But that day, as I’m rocking him, the phone rings, and I see it’s my father. I normally would not have picked up because I don’t like to be on the phone with the baby there. I would’ve called him back. Something said,’Pick up the phone’,” Minaj explained in a conversation with Apple Music’s Ebro Darden.
“I picked up, [my father] was very happy, and he was like: ‘Baby, I could come on Monday?’ because he had been waiting to be able to come to Cali to help me. I kept on saying: ‘Come on out.’ He wasn’t really happy, but I knew that, when he came [to] be with us, we were going to be happy. He is this amazing, great person, who livens up the whole house. I was like: ‘Yes, we were going to get help’,” she stated.
However, the trip never happened because just hours later the rapper got a call from her mom who broke the terrible news that her dad had been involved in an accident.
“[The phone rang again]. It was my mother, telling me that my father was in an accident and that she didn’t know what was going to happen and [that] she would call me back. And then, everything started spinning … [I] couldn’t believe [how quickly everything happened] … he was the happiest that I had heard him in a long time,” Minaj added.
She explained she included a tribute to her dad on her new album Pink Friday 2 as the first song on the record. “Are You Gone Already” features her talking to him and telling him he never got a chance to meet her son, whom she has nicknamed Papa Bear.
“So I’m telling my father, ‘You never got to meet Papa’,” Minaj said of the song.
