50 Cent Reveals Heated Confrontation With Gayle King Over Oprah Winfrey Remarks

50 Cent has opened up about an issue Gayle King took with him over comments he made about Oprah Winfrey. TooFab noted that, in his new autobiography Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter, the always outspoken rapper details a time King confronted him over comments he’d made about Oprah Winfrey in 2012.

At the time, King took issues with a remark 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, made to The Hollywood Reporter. “Oprah’s audience is my audience’s parents, so I could care less about Oprah or her show,” he said at the time. In Jackon’s book, he says King approached him about it at a charity gala. “Gayle is the real deal — a very sophisticated, secure, and smart lady,” Jackson wrote. “She’s never afraid of a situation… so she marched right up to me and basically said, ‘Why you talkin’ s- about my girl?’”

“Listen, I’d love to be Oprah’s friend,” Jackson told King in response. “But if we can’t be friends, could we at least be enemies?” He also clarified what he meant by “enemies.”

“Before meeting me, they had bought into the 50 Cent persona,” Jackson wrote. “Someone who got into beefs and drama because he just couldn’t help himself. 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.”

Strategy aside, King actually brought Jackson and Winfrey together that same year when he appeared on Winfrey’s special, Oprah’s Next Chapter, back in 2012. Though their “feud” had been put aside, it was recently re-ignited when Jackson criticized Winfrey for her approach to the #MeToo movement on social media.

Jackson also waded into King’s own recent controversy, when she asked WNBA star Lisa Leslie about Kobe Bryant’s rape allegations just weeks after the NBA star was killed in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26. In the clip, King asks Leslie about Bryant’s “complicated” legacy in regards to his sexual assault charge, which was dismissed in 2004.

“It’s not complicated. You just said it was dismissed,” Jackson said in an Instagram video he posted with him watching the clip. King agreed that the video appeared to be in poor taste, but stressed that the segment everyone took issue with was edited for a promotional spot, and the question made more sense in the context of the full interview.