Laverne Cox says two high-profile rappers have made moves on her and openly flirted with her.
The Orange is the New Black star, who is openly transgender, opened up about the encounters during a recent appearance on the Baby, This is Keke Palmer podcast.
Without revealing either rapper’s identity, the 54-year-old actress recalled one of them showing an obvious interest in her whenever their paths crossed.
“When I first kind of came on the scene, he would very kind of overtly hit on [me], like, just really excited to see me every time he saw me,” Cox recalled around the one-hour, 13-minute mark of the video linked below. “He was cute and I was open to it and then there was a period when I just kept running into him. I remember we were at Soho House and he was in a meeting, and then all of that energy that he was always excited about—it just dissipated.”
Cox suspects he may have started seeing someone else around that time, but she said she had “heard through the grapevine that he likes the girls.”
“Even with the NDAs, the girls know,” Cox joked.
She went on to recall another encounter, saying a different rapper “threw it hard” at her in front of other people during another Soho House event around 2015.
“My girlfriends were like, ‘Girl, he wants you.’ And he asked for my number,” Cox recalled. “Every woman was throwing their p-words at this man … I was like, ‘Do I really want to date this man? He’s more famous than me. I don’t want to be known for dating this guy.’ And he probably would never date me openly, and I am not going to sleep with some rapper on the DL. I’m Laverne Cox. That’s not gonna happen.”
She continued, “Girl, his game was amazing. I was like, ‘Oh.’ And he looked good back then too. Then he was like, ‘Can I get your number?’ And I was like, ‘If you really want it, you can find it.’”
Palmer was stunned by Cox’s response and playfully teased her for essentially sending the unnamed rapper on a “scavenger hunt.” Cox explained that she didn’t want to make things “easy” for him, eventually acknowledging that nothing ever came of the interaction.
“Rejection is God’s protection, girl. The things that have come out, whew,” she said. “I dodged a bullet.”
Cox revisited these encounters and other personal stories in her memoir Transcendent, which was released in June.
