All of this had a profound impact on Lil Mama. “It hurt,” she told Complex. “It took a lot of mental strength, spiritual strength, and physical strength, not to want to hurt others, not to want to hurt myself. A person could be damn near suicidal.” She explained that she lost a lot of work because of it. “A lot of people felt like they didn’t want to take a chance on me with certain things because it might have made Jay Z or Alicia Keys not want to work with them,” she said.
Lil Mama also apparently tried to involve another star in this: Beyoncé.
“As I’m walking, I stop, and I’m like—‘come on, come on, let’s go,’ to Beyoncé,” Lil Mama said. “And she’s like, ‘What?’ She couldn’t believe it. I was trying to celebrate the city. Now that I’m a woman, how crazy would it have looked if she walked up there? They would have been like, [Beyoncé’s] jealous, she can’t stand to see [Jay Z] with another woman. And here I am, someone who’s not in that state of mind, not thinking that way, just caught up in the moment. I look back and think, damn, she was right. I was tripping.”