Nelly made sure Ashanti wasn't a "baby mama" by marrying her shortly after she got pregnant with their first child together.
Months after the birth of their 10-month-old son, Kenkaide "KK" Haynes, it was reported that Ashanti and Nelly married in 2023. But on a new episode of The Bootleg Kev Podcast, posted on Monday (March 25), the three-time Grammy winner shared why he met his now-wife at the altar before she became a first-time mom. The St. Louis native also recalled how he and Ashanti reconciled after roughly a decade since their last breakup and a period of dating other people.
"I didn't want it [to be] tense," Nelly said around the 4:30-minute mark about spotting the R&B singer at Fat Joe and Ja Rule's 2021 Verzuz event. "We didn’t even talk. I just went over, got a hug [to] break the ice. We didn’t talk for another almost eight to nine months to a year. We didn’t have a conversation."
But after Kev joked that the couple mastered how to "hide a wedding," Nelly explained why he was in a rush to walk down the aisle.
"Once we found out that she was pregnant, I was just like yeah–We hadn’t talked about any of that yet," he said. “But I was like, 'Yo, you know what. Let’s just knock this out because we’re gonna be doing so much, and everything’s moving so fast.' And I didn’t want her to be a baby mama."
Nelly also agreed with Kev's perspective about the "right person" and "wrong timing." "I base any relationship on does this person bring more good to your life than bad," Nelly said.
He continued, "I think from me and her, after we got a chance to [talk] and was like, 'Yo a lot of this shit that we was bitching about, we cool. We were way more happier than we thought being pissed off was."
Baby Kareem makes Nelly's third biological child, in addition to his niece and nephew that he adopted after the death of his sister in 2005. But the couple could be growing their family, with Ashanti recently telling E! News that she wants to have "one or two more" children.
