Keke Palmer Reflects On Being In ‘Inappropriate’ Relationship With An Older Man When She Was A Teen
Famous American singer and actor, Keke Palmer is looking back on her past relationship with older men.
While promoting her upcoming memoir, Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative, in an interview with PEOPLE, Palmer opened up about a relationship she had with an older man while she was a teenager starring in Nickelodeon’s True Jackson VP.
The actress says that while she was a teen starring on True Jackson VP she was in a secret relationship with a 20-year-old man.
“I was trying to balance between being really young, but also feeling quite mature. If I thought it was inappropriate, then I wouldn’t have done it.”
Palmer continued,
“Obviously I shouldn’t have been 15 dating no 20-year-old but in my mind it was like ‘I got a full-time job. . . . Can’t nobody understand me but a grown man.’ But he knew there was a lot of stuff that there’s no damn way for me to understand at damn 15.”
“I wasn’t mentally able to process and understand things that would’ve made that relationship appropriate.”
Still, it took her years to understand that her romance with the older man, whom she didn’t name, wasn’t appropriate until she started dating her now-ex-boyfriend Darius Jackson.
“It wasn’t until I was a real grown woman, and even then we know we’ve still got more time to grow. But by 26, 27, 28, I had finally experienced, I think, genuine love,” she said of the revelation.
“Not that I didn’t love that [other] person, but it wasn’t until I’d felt what it was like for someone to love me back and to actually give me respect, that I’ve realized that relationship was wrong.”
In that same cover story with PEOPLE, the Nope star opened up about allegedly being abused by a peer when she was five years old.
“People don’t really think about child-on-child molestation, but it’s something that exists,” said Palmer, who writes about the alleged abuse in her book.
“I felt weird and violated, but I didn’t really know how to place it. I just knew I had all these weird feelings and thoughts, and I felt a little bit out of control and overwhelmed.”
It wasn’t until years later, when she was 12, that she realized how her past experience had impacted her.
“I was reading a book about sexual abuse, and it said all these things about anxiety and hyper-sexualization,” she told PEOPLE.
“All of this stuff that I attributed to me but really it was because of what I had experienced.”
Looking back, Palmer said,
“It wasn’t about blaming that other child. We don’t know sometimes what has happened to us, especially if it doesn’t look the way that the world has told you it looks like.”
Keke and Darius, who share son Leodis, 20 months, began their relationship in 2021 before ending it in 2023.
Shortly after their split, Palmer obtained a temporary domestic violence restraining order against the fitness instructor. In the year since, Keke and Darius have reached a joint custody agreement.