Breaking: Nicki Minaj's Sister In Law Testifies About When She Learned Of Her Daughter's Alleged Rape
Breaking: Nicki Minaj’s Sister-In-Law Testifies About When She Learned Of Her Daughter’s Alleged Rape
Splash/ Nassau County PD
Jacqueline Robinson Testified Against Her Estranged Husband Jelani In His Child Rape Case
The mother of the girl who accused Nicki Minaj’s brother of repeatedly raping her revealed when she first suspected that Jelani may have been abusing her daughter.
Jacqueline Robinson testified Wednesday in Nassau County Court that in 2015 she arrived home to a drunken and enraged Jelani Maraj berating her then 11-year-old daughter over his belief that she’d told Child Protective Services about the abuse. The family had been summoned for a meeting with social services later that day.
“He was yelling at her, asking her ‘what did you say?’” Robinson said from the witness stand. “He kept badgering her and screaming at her. She said ‘I didn’t say anything.’ She was very afraid.”
Later, Robinson said she asked her daughter about the abuse on the car ride over while Jelani stayed at home.
“I asked (her) was anything going on with her and Jelani,” Robinson said. “And she said no.”
Social workers later took Robinson aside and revealed the news, she said. Later, when authorities took the alleged victim to the hospital to administer a rape kit, Robinson said she confronted her then-husband by phone.
“He said it wasn’t true,” the mom said. “I said, ‘well then what did (alleged victim’s brother) see? It wasn’t a figment of his imagination.”
A tearful Robinson, 46, laid bare the details of what she said was a relationship fraught with abuse and alcoholism. She said she first met Maraj in in 2007 in Queens, after she said she got lost on the way to take one of her kids to a piano lesson. Maraj stopped and gave her directions.
They developed a platonic friendship for years, with Maraj coming over for dinner and occasionally going out for drinks, she said.
Robinson said Maraj asked her out and their relationship progressed, with Robinson and her kids moving into Maraj’s mom’s Long Island home, where he lived. He’d stopped working after Nicki Minaj began paying him a salary, she said.
“He was becoming more of a father figure to (alleged victim’s brother),” the mom said. The alleged victim “asked if she could call him Dad. He said, ‘talk to your mom.’ I said sure.”
In 2014, Nicki Minaj bought them a $500,000 house around the corner from the rapper’s mother, and gave Robinson use of a rental car.
Things seemed like they were looking up, but by 2015, Robinson said her relationship was falling apart.
“There was physical and emotional abuse,” she said. “He would accuse me of cheating. And it was alcohol abuse. It was excessive.”
The mom admitted she’d hit her kids with her hands and with a phone charger during this time, and said she also hit the bottle in a bid to escape the relationship’s problems. She said she’d normally down three to four drinks after work before she went home. Maraj, she said, would drink all day.
“I would drink excessively because I didn’t want to argue, I didn’t want to fight with the defendant,” Robinson said.
Around that time, Robinson said she also noticed a change in her two kids, especially her daughter.
The alleged victim “became very distant and quiet and wanted to be by herself,” Robinson testified. “I would ask her what was wrong, and she would say ‘nothing,’ or she would put her head down.”
Robinson said she became “sexually frustrated” after Maraj stopped having sex with her, and said they’d only had sex once while they were married.
“He and I were not intimate with each other,” she said. “He would sleep on one side of the bed and I would sleep
on the other.”
Nevertheless, Robinson said she loved Maraj and agreed to go through with their wedding, even borrowing nearly $17,000 from her pension to help pay for it. Nicki Minaj also pitched in $30,000, she said.
“I loved that when we weren’t drinking, we had a wonderful relationship,” Robinson said. “I was hoping that if I changed by by not drinking, our relationship would be stronger.”
The trial continues.
