The ‘Girl Trip’ star – who has two children, Jaden, 19, and 16-year-old Willow, with husband Will Smith – has revealed she was into the illegal substances when she first met late rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in September 1996 after being shot four times in a drive-by shooting.
Speaking about her friendship with the ‘Keep Ya Head Up’ hitmaker, she said: “I haven’t really told the whole story.
“One of the things that is very interesting that I’ve never really said before is that when I first met Pac, when we first met, I was a drug dealer.
“I won’t get into the details, because I’m going to write a book about it. That’s how we started.”
The 45-year-old actress admitted “something very bad” happened which prompted her to turn her life around, and she always thought the same thing would happen to Tupac one day.
She said: “As I was coming out something very bad happened to me. As I was coming out of the life, he was going more into the life.
“I thought, ‘God, one day you are going to do for Pac what you did for me. You saved me.’ But that just never happened to him.”
But Jada insisted the pair were just friends and never involved romantically.
Speaking on radio show ‘Sway in the Morning’ on SiriusXM, she added: “I know that most people wanna always connect us in this romance thing, but that’s just because they don’t have the story.
“It was based in survival, how we held each other down, you know what I’m saying?
“It wasn’t just about, ‘You have this cute girl and this cool guy they must have been in this romance.’ Nah. It wasn’t that at all.
“It was about survival and it’s always been about survival between us.”
Jada’s friendship with Tupac has recently made the headlines following the release of documentary ‘All Eyez On Me’, but the star feels “deeply hurtful” by the portrayal of their bond on the film.
She said: “The reimagining of my relationship to Pac has been deeply hurtful.”
Tupac is portrayed by Demetrius Shipp Jr., while Kat Graham plays Jada.
Their friendship features prominently on the film from the pair’s days as aspiring students at the Baltimore School for the Arts in Maryland.