Following the release of her new album Just Keke, Keke Palmer is sharing more details about her tumultuous relationship with ex Darius Jackson.
The multi-hyphenate star recently appeared on The Breakfast Club to talk about her newly released 18-track LP, which sheds light on some of the headline-making drama between her and Jackson.
“I can’t speak for him but obviously there was discomfort,” Palmer said of her ex at the five-minute mark in the video linked above. “Anytime you’re dating somebody in the public eye, and you’re not a person [in] the public eye, it just brings a dynamic that you can’t explain unless you’ve experienced it.”
Palmer and Jackson welcomed their son Leodis in February 2023. Later that year, their relationship went under the microscope after Jackson publicly criticized the outfit Palmer wore while seeing Usher perform in Las Vegas.
“It’s the outfit tho… you a mom,” wrote Jackson on his X account at the time.
“After you have a kid you start to see things that maybe you didn’t see the way you saw them before,” Palmer reflected. “It almost opens up whatever insecurities you have, whatever insecurities they have. Because you go from being a one to a two and now a three.
“Having a child—it really will test the relationship and show you who you have to be to show up for that child,” she added.
In November 2023, Palmer filed for sole custody of their son and a restraining order against Jackson for alleged abuse. He denied all the allegations and filed his own counterclaim.
Palmer eventually dropped the case against her ex, with court documents obtained by The Blast confirming that a restraining order hearing, originally scheduled for July 26, 2024, was removed from the court calendar.
“I hate that people had to see that. That’s not what I want people to see. I wasn’t even thinking about me because I already knew what happened,” she said. “On the other hand, I was like, obviously I don’t condone this, and that’s why … I had to move the way I needed to move because that’s not cool to me.”
She continued, “But just the fact that people had to see it, I hated it for my fans, for the people that cared about me … Drama and all that type of stuff.”
Palmer also addressed the drama with the single “My Confession,” which was released last month and interpolates a small part of Usher’s 2004 hit “Confessions Part II.”
“I felt like I grew so much in terms of learning better boundaries with myself because, honestly, I never would really even be public with a relationship. But this was a different love, right? This is the love that brought Leo, my son, into my life,” Palmer told The Breakfast Club. “So it was a different level, so I was pushing the envelope with my personal and professional boundaries.
She continued, “I don’t want to say I regret it, you know, because it is what it is, and it opened up a new phase of my life of how I want to be less fragmented and be more integrated in there. But at the end of the day, yeah, it’s like, I’m never going to not be Keke Palmer, you know?”
