The 'I Like It' rapper says she's not proud of the things she did 'to survive.'
Cardi B wants people to know that she's not proud of everything she did in the past.
The "I Like It" rapper took to Instagram on Tuesday to speak out after receiving backlash over a resurfaced Instagram Live video that seemingly shows her claiming she drugged and robbed men during her time as a stripper.
"I never claim to be perfect or come from a perfect world with a perfect past. I always speak my truth, I always own my s**t," she wrote on Tuesday. "I'm a part of a hip-hop culture where you can talk about where you come from, talk about the wrong things you had to do to get where you are."
"There are rappers that glorify murder violence drugs an robbing. Crimes they feel they had to do to survive," Cardi continued. "I never glorified the things I brought up in that live I never even put those things in my music because I'm not proud of it and feel a responsibility not to glorify it."
Cardi appears to say in her previous Instagram Live, “I had to go strip, I had to go, 'Oh yeah, you want to f**k me? Yeah yeah yeah, let’s go back to this hotel,' and I drugged n****s up and I robbed them. That's what I used to do." Outrage erupted on social media, causing #SurvivingCardiB to trend on Twitter.
The new mom didn't deny her behavior in her statement on Tuesday. She said she did the things she did at the time "because I had very limited options." "I was blessed to have been able to rise from that, but so many women have not. Whether or not they were poor choices at the time, I did what I had to do to survive," she expressed.
"The men I spoke about in my Live were men that I dated that I was involved with, men that were conscious, willing and aware," she concluded. "I have a past that I can't change. We all do."
Cardi captioned her post, "All I can do now is be a better me for myself my family and my future."
The rapper started stripping at 19 years old, previously sharing that it helped her escape poverty and domestic violence. Cardi -- who is set to star alongside Jennifer Lopez in a movie about strippers -- hasn't been shy about her past.
“People say, ‘Why do you always got to say that you used to be a stripper? We get it,'" she told Cosmopolitan last year. "Because y’all don’t respect me because of it, and y’all going to respect these strippers from now on.”
See more on Cardi in the video below.
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