Jay-Z Finally Explained Why He Cheated On Beyonce
His marriage to Beyoncé wasn't built on "100% truth."
YouTube Though he was quiet for sometime after Beyoncé accused him of cheating in her album, "Lemonade," Jay-Z is still opening up about his infidelity.
In a video confessional that was released in 2017, a week after his new album, "4:44," the rapper reveals that his marriage with Queen B wasn't exactly as perfect as it seemed.
With a posse of Will Smith, Kendrick Lamar, Aziz Ansari and Chris Rock all gathered around in "Footnotes for 4:44" to discuss all their ups and downs with their romantic relationships.
Jay-Z reveals the strain he felt in the relationship between he and his father, who abandoned the family when Jay-Z was just 11.
In 2009 Oprah Winfrey asked Jay-Z how he felt when his father abandoned him and what emotions he felt:
"Anger. At the whole situation. Because when you're growing up, your dad is your superhero.
"Once you've let yourself fall that in love with someone, once you put him on such a high pedestal and he lets you down, you never want to experience that pain again.
"So I remember just being really quiet and really cold. Never wanting to let myself get close to someone like that again.
"I carried that feeling throughout my life, until my father and I met up before he died."
It wasn't until he was 33 years old, that Jay-Z met with his father and forgave him.
His father died of liver failure shortly after.
“What I thought when I met my dad was, ‘Oh, I’m free to love now,’” he said in the video.
“But how are you gonna do it? You’ve never done this before.
"No one informed you how to do this. You don’t even have the tools to do it.
"That’s why I say [to Beyoncé] in the song ‘4:44’, ‘You mature faster than me, I wasn’t ready.’ This is my real life.”
“I just ran into this place, and we built this big, beautiful mansion of a relationship that wasn’t totally built on 100 percent truth,” he said.
“And then it started cracking, then things start happening that the public can see.
"Then, we had to go to a point and be like, ‘OK, tear this down, and let’s start from the beginning.’”
Jay-Z also admitted that confessing his infidelity to Bey was harder than living on the streets.
“Nothing’s harder than this — by far. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Most people give up.”
In a another interview with David Letterman on his Netflix show "My Next Guest Needs No Introduction" in 2018,.
Jay-Z also admitted he didn’t have the emotional tools required for a marriage, but through therapy and Beyoncé’s support, he’s working on it.
“For a lot of us, especially where I grew up and men in general, we don’t have emotional cues from when we were young. Our emotional cue is ‘Be a man. Don’t cry,’ ” he told Letterman.
Emily Blackwood is an editor and writer focused on celebrity and entertainment news.