Fresh off the release of her new album Just Keke, Keke Palmer is opening up about her rocky relationship with ex Darius Jackson.
During a recent appearance on The Breakfast Club, the singer and actress discussed her 18-track project, which dives into the emotional ups and downs of their time together.
“I can’t speak for him but obviously there was discomfort,” Palmer said around the five-minute mark. “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. But by mid-year, their relationship drew major attention after Jackson publicly called out Palmer over the outfit she wore to an Usher concert in Las Vegas.
“It’s the outfit tho… you a mom,” Darius Jackson wrote on X at the time, sparking a wave of backlash and headlines.
Reflecting on that period, Keke Palmer shared, “After you have a kid you start to see things that maybe you didn’t see the way you saw them before. 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.”
She added, “Having a child—it really will test the relationship and show you who you have to be to show up for that child.”
In November 2023, Palmer filed for sole custody of their son and also sought a restraining order against Jackson, citing alleged abuse. Jackson denied all the claims and responded with a counterclaim of his own.
Keke Palmer has officially dropped her case against ex Darius Jackson, with court documents obtained by The Blast showing that the restraining order hearing originally scheduled for July 26, 2024, was taken off the court calendar.
Speaking about the situation, Palmer expressed her disappointment that the public had to witness such a personal chapter of her life. “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 added, “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 addressed the situation in her music as well, most notably on her recent single “My Confession,” which samples a 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,” she shared on The Breakfast Club.
She continued, “So it was a different level, so I was pushing the envelope with my personal and professional boundaries. 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?”
