An encounter at the mall led to Tiny Harris and T.I. establishing one of hip-hop’s most iconic relationships.
The XSCAPE member was on a recent episode of Rickey Smiley on the Spot and looked back on meeting the 3-time Grammy winner, who she married in 2010. The couple share three children together and separately have several older children from their previous relationships.
Harris recalled that she and T.I. originally met while at Jazze Pha’s Noontime Studios in Atlanta but claims to have ignored the rapper while he was “trying to talk” to her.
“I blew him off or whatever,” Harris told Smiley. “But he was so young at the time.”
Close to a year later, Harris ran into the “Bring Em Out” artist at the mall while she was with her daughter, Zonnique, who was roughly 4 at the time.
“I noticed that he looked damn good. I still remember what he looked like, what he had on,” Harris said, describing that T.I. had a “Polo outfit” and a “country twang.”
“I talked to him for a minute and I end up going into Victoria's Secret and he end up coming in there,” Harris explained, adding that they ended up exchanging numbers in the lingerie store.
The singer also brought up T.I. seeing her in XSCAPE’s music video for “Just Kickin’ It” and plotting on meeting his future wife. The rapper also told the story during a recent visit on Hot 97, joking that he planned to “get that little one.”
The couple’s first date was at a “$3 dollar café,” where they ate chicken wings and talked in a parked car, with a young Zonnique also being present, before the two would go on to talk on the phone for months.
Elsewhere, Harris shared that T.I. won her over during an early performance at former Bankhead venue Bounce and witnessing the crowd’s reaction to the rapper’s stage presence.
“He went on stage and every song the people in there were singing every word,” she said. “I'm just in there. But I knew it sounded good and I seen that the people was with him. Right then I said, ‘Okay, he's got potential. He’s going to be somebody.’"
While Harris and T.I. have been slightly more private about their marriage in the years since their former reality TV show, T.I. & Tiny: The Family Hustle, Last August, the couple celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary and shared a recap of their trip to Phucket, Thailand.
