Nicki Minaj is furious. The rapper went on Instagram Live to vent in a 14-minute rant Wednesday (Sept. 14) after the White House denied her claim that she was invited there to discuss the COVID-19 vaccines after she tweeted unsubstantiated claims about the shots’ potential side effects.
“Do you think I’d go on the internet and lie about being invited to the f—ing White House?! Like, what?!” Minaj began. “Do you all think I would lie?! What?!”
“You know what the request was? ‘We’d like to offer Nicki an invitation to come to the White House to speak with two people,” the “Trollz” rapper said of the call she and her team had with White House reps, noting that they said she’d be speaking to Dr. Fauci and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. “And do you know what I said? I said, ‘Well, I would rather not have to travel. Can we do a Live? And they said they’re open to me choosing a platform to do a Live. But they have never taken that off the table for me to come to the White House.”
She added that she wanted to do a public discussion because it wouldn’t feel authentic to her fans otherwise, and that she was worried they’d think she was trying to sell them on the vaccines. Minaj added that everyone on the call agreed with her line of thinking. According to the rapper, things went sideways about three hours after the call, after she had tweeted to tell fans she had been invited to the White House.
“They got back on the phone with my management and my publicist and said they weren’t too happy about me letting people know I was going there,” Minaj alleged. “Anyway, do you guys think I would make that up?!”
A White House official told Billboard of Minaj’s claim she was invited, “As we have with others, we offered a call with Nicki Minaj and one of our doctors to answer questions she has about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.”
Though Minaj is heated about the alleged invite-then-disinvite to the White House, she wasn’t completely mad about the entire situation. “This is no way being disrespectful to the people that reached out, because I think that was a really nice gesture, and this has nothing to do with them,” she said. “I would imagine that they must be feeling some sort of pressure when they have all these people attacking me and coming at them like, ‘Why would you invite her there?!’ Like, that’s sad. They shouldn’t be questioned on why.”
But she wasn’t too pleased about the bit that the White House has offered others similar calls. “Just imagine someone saying, ‘We offered Nicki Minaj the same phone call we offer everybody else.’ What?!” she exclaimed. “You think they would offer that to Mookie in the projects? No! ‘Everybody else…’”
While Minaj may be steamed about what went down with the alleged White House invite, she’s also unhappy about being called out for the tweets in which she shared the alleged tale of how her cousin’s friend in Trinidad reportedly suffered from swollen testicles after receiving a COVID-19 shot, and saying she wanted to do more research before getting vaccinated. “We’re living in a place without free healthcare,” she said. “So anybody in this country has the right to question anything about their health, because if your health mattered that fucking much, there would be free fucking healthcare, bozos.”
Dr. Fauci and Trinidad’s health minister have both debunked the claim that the coronavirus vaccines could cause swollen testicles.
Minaj also said in an Instagram Story earlier in the night that her Twitter account had been locked after her tweets about the COVID-19 vaccines. “I’m in Twitter jail y’all. They didn’t like what I was saying over that on that block, I guess,” she wrote. “My poll was gonna be Asking questions is OK I like being fkng dumb. Then boom. Can’t tweet.”
When Billboard reached out to Twitter for comment on Minaj’s account, the social media platform denied it had taken any action against her. A Twitter spokesperson said: “Twitter did not take any enforcement action on the account referenced.”
Watch Minaj’s rant below:
