1995-04403 words · 2 min
Ready to Live (Part 4): Tupac's Version of the Night of the Crime
Vibe, April 1995: Tupac gives his side of the 1993 incident that sent him to prison. The court and the woman involved saw it differently.
Original: “Ready to Live” (Part 4) · Vibe · Kevin Powell · April 1995
In November 1993, a night in Tupac’s Manhattan hotel suite ended with a police response. A young woman accused him and men from his circle of sexual abuse. In the fourth part of the interview, Kevin Powell asks about the case that sent Tupac to prison for it. Here, he puts his version of the night of the crime on the record.
Frozen and Looking Away
Tupac describes an encounter with the woman a few days earlier at the club Nell’s, where “Nigel” and “Trevor” had taken him, as consensual. For the night of the crime, he recounts how the woman came to the hotel and he went into a room with her. Then other men reportedly came in. Tupac says he froze, left the room, and lay down to sleep next door.
When he was woken up, the woman was distraught and accused him of letting it happen. Shortly thereafter, the police arrived. He had done nothing himself, Tupac insists-but he is ashamed of his silence. He had wanted to belong.
Anger and Transformation in Prison
The case changed his view of women. While facing charges, he admits, he hated Black women because no one defended him after Keep Ya Head Up. Only during the trial and later in prison, through female guards among others, did his view change. At the end of the section, he mentions his new album Me Against the World and declares “Thug Life” dead.
The Court’s Response
Tupac’s account is a version in his own defense that the court did not fully accept. On December 1, 1994, the jury found him guilty on two counts of first-degree sexual abuse and acquitted him of the more serious charges.
At his sentencing in February 1995, Tupac tearfully apologized to the woman, but insisted that he had committed no crime. The case against Jacques Agnant, widely identified as “Nigel,” was severed. It ended with a guilty plea to a misdemeanor without jail time. A civil suit brought by the woman was later settled.
The woman did not let Tupac’s account stand. Shortly after the interview appeared, she forcefully contradicted him in her own letter to Vibe. Her perspective firmly belongs with this text.