Killer Mike has revealed he kept his marriage to wife Shana secret from everyone for nine years.
During Wednesday’s episode on the Off Menu podcast with hosts Ed Gamble and James Acaster, the Grammy-winning rapper recalled marrying his wife Shana in Las Vegas in 2006.
“Within the first two weeks (of dating) I asked her to marry me and she was like, ‘Get the f**k out of here. You’re a rapper.’ So, after about four or five years, we got really high in Vegas, and really drunk, and I pled my love to her, and we got married in a f**king drive-through marriage thing with our cab driver as our witness, and then we didn’t tell anybody we were married for nine years,” Mike told Ed and James.
“We’ve been married seventeen years now. So, for nine years no one knew, and then we finally had to tell her family – because her family is from Hilton Head Island (in South Carolina) and they’re very traditional… a tight-knit Black family, similar to mine.”
Mike, real name Michael Render, explained that during those nine years, Shana’s family members would often ask him when they were going to get married.
The couple finally decided to tell their family about their marriage after asking for help to build a property.
“We were talking about building on some land here, we’d like to put a house here, and they were like, ‘Nah, you’re just f**king on our niece. What are you gonna do to take it seriously?'” the Run the Jewels star remembered. “I was like, ‘Well, we’re already married.'”
In the end, the family was “fine” with Shana’s secret marriage to the rapper.
“No one really likes going to weddings,” Mike joked on the podcast. “The food is usually s**tty.”
Mike and Shana have four children.
