Nicki Minaj and her sex offender husband accused of harassing rape victim

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A woman who was sexually assaulted by Nicki Minaj‘s husband in the 90s has claimed that he and the rapper have been harassing her for months and offered to pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars to recant her story.  

The victim came forward with her alarming allegations in an interview with the Daily Beast on Thursday, using only her first name, Jennifer.  

Jennifer accused Minaj’s now-husband Kenneth ‘Zoo’ Petty of sexually assaulting her when they were both 16 years old in 1994. Petty was convicted of attempted rape a year later. 

Minaj defended her husband’s sex offender status after they tied the knot in 2019 and claimed his accuser had lied and that she’d attempted to recant her statement to police back in 1995. 

But Jennifer has insisted that she never considered walking back her claims – despite Minaj and Petty’s alleged efforts to get her to do so. 

She claimed that over the last year, Minaj and Petty – who grew up in the same part of New York City as she did – recruited several people close to her family in a vicious intimidation campaign that’s forced her to move three times for fear of her safety.  

Jennifer said the harassment began in March of last year – immediately after Petty was arrested for failing to register as a sex offender. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.  

Jennifer said she’s been in contact with federal authorities investigating the alleged harassment campaign since last August. 

She began sharing her story publicly in November after she claimed an associate of Minaj and Petty approached her daughter at a club and threatened her. 

In January she posted a video showing her face for the first time, in which she tearfully pleaded: ‘Tell your f**king people to leave my family alone… Leave me and my family the f**k alone.’

Representatives for Minaj and Petty did not immediately return requests for comment from DailyMail.com or the Daily Beast.  

It was only four days after Petty’s arrest last March that Jennifer said she was first contacted by someone she believes was acting at Minaj and Petty’s behest – a man named Barry who was childhood friends with her brother.  

Jennifer said she wasn’t fazed when Barry brought up Minaj and Petty, because it had only been a few months since court records detailing the assault were released in the media. 

Barry offered to make the drama around the court case ‘go away’, Jennifer said, before telling her that Minaj wanted to speak with her directly. 

She said she was taken aback but offered up her phone number anyway. ‘Next thing you know, my phone rings, and it’s her,’ she told the Daily Beast.

Jennifer claimed that Minaj told her she’d heard she was ‘willing to help them out’, and offered to fly her from Atlanta, where she lived, to Los Angeles.  

During that conversation she recalled telling Minaj: ‘Listen. I just need you to know, woman to woman, this really happened.’ 

She said she initially thought Minaj and Petty wanted to come to a non-disclosure agreement, and that the rapper indicated that she wanted to speak again, but they never did. 

A few days later Jennifer said she received a call from her brother, with whom she said she was not particularly close, who said a man named Jamie had called one of their cousins and offered to pay $500,000 if Jennifer agreed to speak with Petty’s lawyer. 

Jennifer said she approached Barry about the bizarre offer and he said there was no way it could have come from Minaj or Petty.  

‘I was confused as to how all of this was happening around me,’ she said. ‘I’m like, “You say Nicki’s not involved, but she’s the one who called me.”‘ 

She said Barry then began pressuring her to write a letter recanting her 1994 rape allegation.

She said she never considered doing it, but tried to ‘stall’ Barry – in part by telling him she was worried about being prosecuted – because she was concerned that he knew where she lived.  

Barry responded by insisting that she couldn’t get in trouble because the statute of limitations had passed and connected her with lawyers to convince her of that. 

Jennifer said she did meet with two lawyers, but told them she had no intention of recanting and that she just wanted to be left alone – but that didn’t happen.

Soon after, she claimed Barry showed up at her house with $20,000 in cash and a letter he wanted her to sign admitting that she’d lied about the assault.  

‘I came outside and sat in the car, and he pulled out the letter and the $20,000 out of his middle console and put the money on my lap,’ Jennifer said. 

‘I held it in my hands, and I put it on the floor in the passenger seat. And I told him: “I’m not taking it. I don’t want it.”‘

It wasn’t until that point that Jennifer came to believe Barry wasn’t on her side.  

‘It was like this dude, he really doesn’t give two s**ts about me,’ she said. 

Jennifer said she was then contacted in early June by her brother, who said that their cousin had told him ‘they’ knew where she lived.  

‘Don’t be surprised if they’re sitting on your couch,’ he allegedly said in apparent reference to Petty’s associates. 

Fearing for her safety, Jennifer made her first of three moves that year, to another part of Georgia, and changed her phone number because she didn’t know what else she could do or who she could trust. 

‘I didn’t know who to call,’ she said. ‘Who do I call?… I don’t want to go to the cops and get them locked up because then what would that do to me? Then what would happen to me? 

‘Now, instead of having this person after me, I’m gonna have them and their family and their friends after me… It was chaos.’ 

Jennifer said she later learned that Barry was so invested in the saga because he wanted Minaj to attend his six-year-old daughter’s birthday party. 

She said her brother and cousin got involved because they wanted Minaj to appear at a club and split the profits from the promotion.   

 

Like Petty and Minaj, Jennifer grew up in the South Jamaica neighborhood in Queens, where she was raised by a woman who adopted her as an infant.  

She was 16 when the alleged assault occurred after Petty approached her while she was walking to school on September 16, 1994. 

Petty came up behind her, pressed an object into her back and told her to ‘keep walking’ as he led her to his home, according to court records obtained by The Blast. 

Once they arrived, Petty forced her upstairs and began to rape her at knifepoint before she managed to escape after striking him with a bottle, the records state. 

Jennifer immediately reported the incident and went to a hospital for examination. When she returned home she said her adoptive mother told her: ‘Sorry you got raped, but you should have screamed.’

Petty denied Jennifer’s allegations when he was arrested, telling investigators: ‘I didn’t do anything.’

His parents told Jennifer’s mother that the teens were dating, she said, even though she insists that they weren’t.  

‘I think I kind of always just felt like people wanted me to be a liar,’ Jennifer told the Daily Beast. 

She said that in the months after Petty’s arrest, his friends harassed her family relentlessly in an effort to get her to drop the charges. 

At one point her adoptive aunt even brought her to court, she said, but she still refused to walk back her claims and ultimately moved to Florida before the case concluded. 

Petty was ultimately convicted in 1995 on four counts: first-degree attempted rape in the first degree, second-degree assault, second-degree unlawful imprisonment and criminal possession of a weapon. He was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.  

Minaj reportedly started dating Petty after he got out of prison, when he was 21 and she was just 16. 

He landed back behind bars in 2006 after pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the shooting death of Lamont Robinson. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and served seven before being released in 2013.    

Minaj addressed Petty’s attempted rape conviction on her Apple Music show, Queen Radio, in 2019 after facing backlash over her announcement that they’d tied the knot.  

‘When you’re somebody’s wife, you’ve gotta be even more prayed up,’ Minaj said on the show. ‘Because you’ve gotta cover your husband in prayer.’

The rapper insisted that Petty had been wrongfully convicted and claimed that the accuser had planned to write a letter to the judge recanting her statement before realizing that she could face jail time for admitting that she lied. 

Minaj also asserted that the accuser was white, even though Jennifer is biracial – with a white mother and black father. 

Gossip blogger NoseyHeauxLive, who has been defending Jennifer on social media for months, told the Daily Beast she believes Minaj intentionally misrepresented the accuser’s race. 

‘I know from being a black person, when you tell somebody that the woman is white and older than the black boy, that’s making him look like the victim. That’s what Nicki Minaj was trying to do,’ Nosey said. 

‘She was trying to paint this [as an] Emmett Till story,’ she added, referring to the black teen who was kidnapped and murdered after a white woman lied about him whistling at her at a Mississippi grocery store in 1955. 

The US Marshals got involved in the case last summer, after they were contacted by an online friend with whom Jennifer had shared details about the harassment. 

The friend, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Daily Beast that she asked authorities to check on Jennifer after not hearing from her in a while. 

The Marshals arrived at Jennifer’s home in late August, days after she moved for a second time. Jennifer said she initially feared that she was being set up by Petty and Minaj. 

She later learned that the friend had gone to the US Attorney prosecuting Petty’s federal case to raise alarm about the harassment.  

The US Attorney declined to comment on the case, but a source close to the investigation said it is a ‘high priority’ and there is evidence supporting Jennifer’s claims.  

Jennifer was forced to move a third time in October, after a man allegedly approached her 22-year-old daughter Kenya in a club and started asking questions about Jennifer and Petty. 

‘It was scary, and it made me feel threatened,’ Kenya said in a Facebook video late last year. 

Jennifer felt that the only way to protect Kenya was to move away.

She finally spoke publicly in a YouTube video in November, without showing her face, and sought to clear up misinformation about the entire ordeal.  

After that video, several people close to Jennifer, Minaj and Petty came out to attack her on social media – including a cousin that Jennifer’s brother and Petty share. 

‘I know where you live, boo,’ the cousin, Marie, said on the Black Tea Blog. ‘I ain’t scared of police. Check my track record. I ain’t never scared… Stand down, b***h.’ 

But Jennifer refuses to stand down.  

‘I’m hoping for the truth to come out, and whatever comes from that truth, to let it be,’ she told the Daily Beast. 

‘These people were willing to sacrifice me so this guy could remain in the public eye. My family was willing to sacrifice me.’