In the 1990s, Rashida Jones was "furious" about 2Pac's controversial remarks on her father, musical extraodinare Quincy Jones, before patching things up with the late rapper before his death. 2Pac even went on to date Jones' older sister, Kidada Jones
The former #blackAF star revisited the brief feud that she had with 2Pac, legal name Tupac Shakur, in an interview with The New Yorker. In it, journalist Michael Schulman mentioned that Jones was 17 when she wrote a scathing open letter to 2Pac, after the rapper slammed her father in conversation with The Source in 1993. "All he does is stick his dick in white bitches and make fucked up kids," the rapper said at the time.
Rashida, whose mother is the late Peggy Lipton, justifiably took 2Pac's words to heart. In her letter, Rashida called out 2Pac's "ignorance and lack of respect for his people," also accusing him of "destroying his race."
After Schulman asked how Rashida's relationship with 2Pac changed once he began dating her sister, she recalled initially being "Furious! So precocious, so self-righteous."
"Yeah, I was so mad. It was a new perspective to me. I kind of understand the nuance more now that I’m older," she continued. "It just felt like a completely unwarranted attack. My dad doesn’t work for the government. He’s a music producer. How he chooses to live his life and who he loves is just his own business, and I’ve always felt that way."
Jones said she "printed it off my word processor and put it in an envelope and sent it to The Source," while she was interning at Warner Bros. Records. "So I think I wrote it there," she added. "Maybe I had the other intern proof it for me."
Rashida added that Kidada was "somewhere in New York" and that "Tupac came up to apologize to her," thinking she was her younger sister. "It resolved itself really nicely, because when I met him, he immediately apologized to me, immediately apologized to my dad," Rashida recounted. "We sat down and had a really good conversation about it, and then he was family."
Looking back on 2Pac making amends for the misunderstanding Rashida said, "It speaks so much to who he was."
"You can say whatever you’re going to say, and you can mean it. And then, when you meet people, that can change," she explained. "That was an early lesson for me, because I have been self-righteous in my life, and I really have worked hard to stop looking at things in a binary way. We’re so flawed and so complicated."
Quincy Jones shared a similar opinion about 2Pac during a 2012 interview with The New York Times, expressing that he "wasn't happy at first" about her daughter dating the All Eyez On Me artist.
"He’d attacked me for having all these white wives. And my daughter Rashida, who was at Harvard, wrote a letter to The Source taking him apart," he said. "I remember one night I was dropping Rashida at Jerry’s delicatessen, and Tupac was talking to Kidada because he was falling in love with her then. Like an idiot, I went over to him, put two arms on his shoulders and said, 'Pac, we gotta sit down and talk, man.'"
But despite Jones' initial transgressions with 'Pac, the two had a heart-to-heart. "If he had had a gun, I would’ve been done. But we talked," Jones added. "He apologized. We became very close after that. Once, I was having a date at the Hotel Bel-Air, and he came by and told the waiter that he would be back, he was going home to put on a tie."
