Paul Wall generally has a smile on his face whenever he’s in the public eye. The Houston Hip Hop artist, famous for songs such as “Sittin’ Sidewayz,” “They Don’t Know” and “Girls,” has made a comfortable life for himself. But his childhood wasn’t exactly easy.
During a recent interview with The FAQ Podcast, the grillz connoisseur opened up about his biological father and the disturbing things he learned about him over the years. As he explains in the clip, Wall was only 5 or 6 years old when his father left, and he never understood what happened between him and his mother — until he got older.
“I never knew what happened other than my mom would always have me and my sister paranoid that we were ’bout to get kidnapped,” he says. “But then later on in life, I asked my mom one day, like, ‘Whatever happened? Whatever happened to him?’ That’s when I found out horrible things. Man, I can’t believe this stuff! My biological father, he was a child molester. A serial child molester.
“He ended up kidnapping a girl — he started a ‘relationship’ with her when she was 12 years old, 13 years old. Then when she became 14 or 15, he ‘married’ her and they went to Canada and that’s the last time I seen him.”
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Of course, Paul Wall isn’t the first rapper to reveal a horrific past. In a July 2021 interview with Mike Tyson’s podcast Hotboxin With Mike Tyson, Kevin Gates discussed some intensely personal topics. When asked how he got into the music industry, the Atlantic Records artist admitted he’d been sexually abused as a child and music became his saving grace.
“It was an escape for me,” he said at the time. “And I never said this in no interview or no podcast or anything like that. I grew up real, real violent and real aggressive. Not because I wanted to be, but I was molested as a child. So, I had this fear of being vulnerable. I took every kind of martial arts you could take. I even boxed; I did everything. I wanted to be the toughest person on earth. But writing and making music was always an escape for me. I never had the nuts to come out and say that. This is my first time saying this today.”
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Even Hip Hop veteran MC Shan bravely came forward with his own repressed memories of abuse. Speaking to VladTV in 2016, Shan talked about being a member of a skate team and how an older man attempted to sexually assault him.
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“He would sit us next to him in the driver’s seat of the car and let us either do the steering wheel or the stick shift,” he said. “And all of a sudden, I’m old enough to know better, a hand comes around and grabs me by my crotch. That right there is molestation in itself. Never no penetration or none of this kind of crap. But I was old enough to know that this ain’t right.”
Fortunately for Paul Wall, he didn’t became a victim himself and has since sought therapy for help in dealing with his past. Watch the full interview below.
