Jhené Aiko opened up about her “difficult” year after losing her dream home in the Los Angeles wildfires in early 2025.
During her acceptance speech for the Glow Getter Award at Femme It Forward’s Give Her FlowHers Ceremony, the singer reflected on the challenges she faced and the personal losses that followed.
“I was balanced, and in a great place, and then, this year, I lost my dream home that I spent a few years renovating in the LA wildfires,” she shared. “And then I lost my cousin Justin whom I was really close with. Then I lost my sweet little orange kitten.”
“It just seemed like back to back to back to back things, and I was just like, ‘Okay, God, what is the lesson in all this?'” she added. She then recalled a house fire from her childhood and her mother’s calm reaction to it.
“I remember my mother, how she handled it with so much grace, and she never let us feel any type of sadness or any type of sorrow,” Aiko said. “We kind of thought it was cool because we got to live in the Embassy Suites — free breakfast, indoor pool. We were like, ‘Wow, this is nice.’ So when my house burned down this year, I remembered how she handled that so gracefully.”
Toward the end of her speech, Aiko said the flowers she received were really for her “village” — the loved ones who helped her through the “dark place” she found herself in this year.
In January, Aiko lost her home in the Pacific Palisades fire. By March, she visited the area and shared photos of the destruction on her Instagram Stories. “Finally saw it for myself…3 months later,” she wrote on one slide.
In another, she added, “sometimes a sigh is not enough…you gotta scream ‘F————!!!’ at the top of your lungs.”
She closed the Stories with advice for anyone holding in their feelings: “Idk who needs to hear this, but you absolutely MUST cry about it…as often as the feeling comes.”
