Rapper Nicki Minaj is indifferent over the death of her father who died following a hit-and-run over the weekend.
Robert Maraj, 64, was hit by a car that kept going in Mineola, Long Island at 6:15 p.m. ET on Friday night, according to a spokesperson for the Nassau County Police Department.
He was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead on Saturday.
“The investigation is ongoing,” police added.
Nicki, 38, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and raised in the Queens borough of New York City.
In 2010, the rapper described her father as violent towards her mother, telling Rolling Stone that he once set fire to their home with her mother inside.
“I remember when my mother would let my father be violent with her and she always brings up this story about when I was a little girl and I would stand in front of my mother,” the singer said, demonstrating how she put her arms out for protection, in her 2018 documentary Queen.
“That’s why maybe some people would describe me as abrasive or bitchy or whatever because I vowed from that age no man would ever abuse me, call me out my name, treat me like that. Then all of a sudden, that was my life,” Nicki added.
In a 2015 interview with the New York Times, Nicki said they she was never personally abused by her father.
‘No. He was just abusive,’ she said. ‘I would always hear him yelling and cursing, always. And it made me feel it was the way to interact, because that’s how I saw him interacting.’
‘He drank a lot and did drugs, and he would get violent when he did. When he set fire to the house, he was attempting to kill my mother,’ she said at the time.
‘She got out before it burned all the way down. I’ve always had this female-empowerment thing in the back of my mind — because I wanted my mother to be stronger, and she couldn’t be. I thought: “If I’m successful, I can change her life.”‘
The family had already had a tough year, after Minaj’s brother Jelani Maraj was sentenced to life in prison in January 2020 for raping an 11-year-old child.
Jelani, 41, was found guilty of ‘predatory sexual assault against a child and endangering the welfare of a child’ in 2017 and last year, Nassau County Supreme Court Judge Robert McDonald refused to give him a soft sentence.
