50 Cent may not see eye-to-eye with Gayle King, but he recognizes her fearlessness.
The “I Get Money” rapper reflects on a confrontational encounter he had with the “CBS This Morning” host in his upcoming autobiography Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter. 50 Cent says King approached her at Bette Midler’s charity gala to stand-up for Oprah Winfrey.
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“Gayle is the real deal — a very sophisticated, secure, and smart lady,” he writes, according to Page Six. “She’s never afraid of a situation… so she marched right up to me and basically said, ‘Why you talkin’ s**t about my girl?'”
The rapper had taken digs at Winfrey and King would not stand for it. One of those digs, for example, was, “Oprah’s audience is my audience’s parents, so I could care less about Oprah or her show,” per The Hollywood Reporter.
50 Cent explained to King that he had no contempt towards Winfrey and that his beef was simply business. Winfrey had labelled 50 Cent’s lyrics as misogynistic and he decided to roll with it.
“Listen, I’d love to be Oprah’s friend. But if we can’t be friends, could we at least be enemies?” he told King. “But when I said, ‘At least let me be an enemy,’ they understood that when I got into a beef, it was never driven by emotion. Instead, I was moving off of strategy.”
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King helped form a positive relationship between 50 Cent and Winfrey, but it would not last. In recent years, 50 Cent has accused Winfrey of exclusively criticizing black men in the #MeToo movement. He also shunned King for bringing up Kobe Bryant’s sexual assault case so soon after his death.
ET Canada has reached out to King’s rep for a comment
