The late Craig Mack’s ex-wife believes his HIV diagnosis wasn’t accidental.
Roxanne Alexis Hill-Johnson, Mack’s former wife and the mother of his two children, said she thinks the “Flava In Ya Ear” rapper was deliberately infected as part of a setup. Mack, who was signed to Bad Boy Records in the 1990s, later stepped away from the music industry and moved to South Carolina, where he joined a religious community. He passed away in March 2018 at the age of 47.
Speaking in a new interview with The Art of Dialogue, Hill-Johnson revealed that she and their children didn’t learn about Mack’s AIDS diagnosis until just two weeks before his death.
“The kids knew he had been sick, but no one told them what was wrong,” she said, noting that the coroner told her Mack had likely been ill for nearly ten years.
“Unmedicated, all those years. Why? I don’t know. So, if you do the math, that puts him back in New York when he got sick,” she continued.
At the time, New York City was home to Bad Boy Records, founded by Diddy, which remains active despite the mogul currently serving a 50-month sentence on racketeering and sex trafficking charges.
“I believe him getting sick was something that was intentional,” Hill-Johnson said. “Craig was a very heterosexual man. He liked women. He liked the company of women. So when people were saying, ‘Oh, he was gay.’ He wasn’t gay. Someone got to him.”
She also recalled Mack once warning another male artist to “be careful” in the music industry, cautioning that someone might try to “poison” him with a sexually transmitted infection.
Hill-Johnson added that she doesn’t believe Mack took medication for his AIDS diagnosis, or if he did, he never told her or their children.
Details about Mack’s health leading up to his death were previously explored in a lengthy Rolling Stone report last year. While his death certificate reportedly listed HIV/AIDS-related complications as the cause, his family honored his wishes and continued to state that he suffered from congestive heart failure.
