Nicki Minaj had a hard-knock childhood, said Shirley Halperin in Cosmopolitan. At age 4, she left her native Trinidad and moved with her parents to a gritty neighborhood in Queens, N.Y. “On the corner of the block was where the drug dealers would hang out,” says the hip-hop star. Her father became a regular customer and was soon hooked on crack. “My mother left him many different times and came back,” says Minaj, 28. “He would beg, cry, stalk us. One time he pulled my mother out of a car and dragged her for two blocks. After that, I had a phobia about unlocked doors.” During another fight, he set fire to their house. “He was attempting to kill my mother. She got out before it burned all the way down.”
To cope with the chaos, Minaj started dreaming of an over-the-top life and began to create the Technicolor personality that has propelled her to stardom. “I would pray to God to make me famous so I could buy my mother a huge house. I’d tell her, ‘Let’s go to a ballroom, like Cinderella,’” she says. “She would laugh at me, but I knew I wasn’t put here to be a regular person.”
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