Nicki Minaj: From Criminal to Conservative and Her Desperate Struggle for U.S. Citizenship

Nicki Minaj’s now-deleted mugshot. Photo: @nickiminaj/Instagram

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Standing before the UN as a non-U.S. citizen, Nicki Minaj delivered a speech thousands of miles from where she had recently been handcuffed just months earlier in 2024. Opposed to the warm UN hall where she spoke to the world, Nicki had recently rode handcuffed in the cold backseat of a foreign military police car. And before that, she and her husband had faced criminal charges in another country.

To her fans, these incidents were just blips on the radar. For Nicki, these incidents of self-sabotage have developed into an existential threat to her touring profits and road to American citizenship. Her violent record makes her a prime candidate for deportation to Trinidad and Tobago, her country of origin. The UN served as her vessel to reestablish her global reputation, but it wasn’t enough on its own.

After Nicki Minaj stood on that universal stage, she attacked the lifestyles of her fans during a televised TPUSA interview in December 2025. Having supported her for over a decade, her fans have asked why she’s chosen now to turn on them. Understanding why Nicki has abandoned her fans and her values requires examining her violent behaviors that have only escalated over the decades.

2003

Nicki Minaj didn’t smile in her New York Police Department mugshot. Instead, she looked straight ahead, a valley of distance between her and the camera. The charge was criminal possession of a weapon with intent to use, but the backstory to the 2003 arrest was much darker.

Years after her star burned hottest within the music industry, Nicki took to social media in 2021 to reflect on the arrest. “I did use it tho,” she wrote of the knife she’d been arrested with. “This is so inspiring to look back. The girl was leaking blood and spent days in the hospital.” The immediate reaction from her fans was a blend of confusion, discomfort and shock. The words “inspiring” and “leaking blood” sent a wave of cognitive dissonance through the world.

One fan wrote, “How is this inspiring? Attempting to hurt/kill someone? Something is really mentally wrong with my ppl,” while another added, “Is this a reflection or is she boasting on using a weapon and being wanted by the police? S–t definitely ain’t cute.” These are the same questions Nicki Minaj would ask herself now. She’d ask, in what world would a green card holder openly post or brag about stabbing someone?

Instead of responding to the disgust beneath that original post in 2021, Nicki continued promoting the 12th anniversary of her 2009 mixtape Beam Me Up, Scotty. As she reveled in the post she’d soon delete under pressure, she underestimated how it would infect her potential U.S. citizenship and her multi-million-dollar global touring revenue. Less than three years after this post, she would again fight her way into a legal situation that would force her trash her values and bend the knee to the very power structure she had rebelled so hard against.

Broken Jaw In Germany

The tabloids printed a flurry of articles in 2019 after Nicki Minaj’s tour got violent in Germany. Her team got her to address it on social media, and she downplayed the global headlines accusing her husband Kenneth Pettey of breaking the jaw of a security guard in the country. The incident threatened the European leg of her tour which had turned out to be a bigger jewel than she had estimated.

During the promotion of her 2019 tour, Nicki broke news to her fans that the North American leg of her Nicki Minaj WRLD Tour had been cancelled. For a woman who had sold out stadiums in her heyday, cancelling part of a tour due to low ticket sales was a disaster to her ego. It was a sobering reality brightened only by her tour’s reception in Germany.

While Nicki couldn’t sell enough tickets to justify the North American leg of her tour, she’d sold out in Germany. For reasons not even she could understand, over the years, she’d become bigger in Europe than on her own continent. She capitalized off of her global audience with this information. But with more influence came more erratic fans that her security team lost control of. This hit its ugliest peak during the tour while in Frankfurt.

As she performed, a fan stormed the stage, bypassed security and got close enough to touch her. The ordeal shook Nicki up, especially being in a foreign country. This irked her badly enough that she approached her German security after the fact.

Backstage, Nicki confronted the guard responsible for securing the area the fan breached. At some point, Nicki threw a shoe at the female guard and started recording her. A male guard named Thomas Weidenmuller stepped in to intervene. That’s when Kenneth Petty threw a punch the male security guard didn’t see coming. The situation exploded from there.

In a sworn statement, Weidenmuller said he felt blinding pain and knew immediately something wasn’t right. The punch came out of nowhere, and he went directly to the hospital from there, and the prognosis meant years of pain and recovery. His jaw was so badly broken, he’d have to undergo eight surgeries and forever live with a five metal plates in his face. As Weidenmuller fought to recover and be there for his family, Nicki and her husband continued their tour.

In the tussle, the male security guard left with a broken jaw, and Nicki and her husband left the country without charges. It was a victory for them on a time decay. Charges weren’t filed, but her public image was beginning to be contaminated. The very flag of rebellion she had stitched her career together with now risked that same career. Before she could do better, she would be arrested again in another country, and the stakes would be even higher than before.

The Amsterdam Arrest

On May 25th of 2024, Nicki Minaj walked into Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport with dozens of preroll cannabis joints. She had been in the country as part of her Nicki WRLD Tour, and she was flying to do another show in Manchester. Before she could board the plane, military police searched her luggage and booked her. She spent the next few hours in processing and missed the show she had been headed to. Her following social media reflections were a mix of rage, denial and lack of self-accountability.

“Not being able to get to Manchester, I don’t know when was the last time I felt that that low, you know?” she told her fans on the livestreaming platform Stationhead. “And not only that, but just knowing that that something is being done to you on purpose. You are a confident other race, you know?” She acknowledged one female officer who “had a heart,” but she painted the rest as men who lacked empathy. Although her fans heard her out, they were not convinced. The cultural whiplash was socially dizzying.

How was she “mistreated” when she was the one transporting drugs in a foreign airport? How was it a race or gender thing if she actually committed the crime and only got a fine? Most people would serve prison time, but Amsterdam let her off with a fine of less than $400. What Amsterdam didn’t do was allow her to come back and perform. This was the second crack in the foundation of her touring revenue, coming after the Germany incident, but even that wasn’t over. There would be a significant financial toll to pay that would cost less than the toxic PR that came next.

The Letter of the Lawsuit

After Kenneth Petty broke his jaw, Thomas Weidenmuller didn’t just sit down and heal. He attempted to hold Nicki and her husband accountable for his medical bills, but she ignored his claims. She was no longer in Germany, and the complexities of the American judicial system would protect her. That’s what she thought, until a delinquency in paying a default judgment put her at risk of losing her mansion.

In January of 2022, Thomas Weidenmuller finally filed his lawsuit, after years of being ignored by the music star. He would have his day in court and confront the couple that had sent him into eight different surgeries. But Nicki wouldn’t ever hear his story or step into a courtroom to defend herself against the accusations. The courts had subpoenaed her, and she hadn’t budged. In her absence, the judge had no choice but to find in the defendant’s favor. As Weidenmuller found, having a paper judgment and money in his hands were two completely different concepts.

Instead of paying the $500,000, Nicki Minaj ignored the judgment which gave Weidenmuller a right to seek a judgment against her $20 million mansion in 2025. Even then, it took months for her to even begin taking the judgment seriously enough to begin paying. That came only subsequent to a judge beginning the process to sell off her mansion. Out of spite, she paid the judgment at the very latest date possible. Furthermore, the January 23rd, 2026, payment comes at a particular time of distress for her, having not just her revenue but U.S. green card threatened. Ironically, the call for her deportation came from the exact audience she had once motivated and been an idol of.

Two-Faced

Nicki Minaj stared into the camera at TPUSA Fest and gave one of the most desperate 11th-hour talks her fans had ever heard. To them, she was disrespectfully out of place, but to her, she was just an entertainer convincing a different audience. Her factless comments led to a scathing backlash that drew the final line between her and the Original Barbs.

Nicki didn’t hold back on groveling and distorting information during her interview with Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated Conservative Charlie Kirk. “I don’t need someone with blond hair and blue eyes to downplay their beauty because I know my beauty. No matter how you look, we should be trying to instill into them to be proud of how they look,” Nicki told the widow. Her comments casually disregarded how the standard of beauty in America historically rejected the Black woman. Had she taken time to read Lena Williams’s It’s the Little Things: Everyday Interactions That Anger, Annoy, and Divide the Races, she would’ve gained a more informed perspective.

In the book, Williams examines everyday interactions between the races that divide them at the root socially. It further gives a historic account of the “Blonde Hair and Blue Eyes” standard of beauty that acts as a tool of eugenics.

As an example, Adolf Hitler concluded blonde hair and blue eyes signaled the purest form of humanness. Anything else was the contaminated bloodline of vermin. He used this horrific logic and pseudoscience to justify one of the deadliest genocides humanity has seen.

In that context, “beauty” is a historical weapon used as justification to “otherize.” The word itself has become a loaded dog whistle Nicki Minaj herself blows either mindlessly or callously. In its rawest form, she’s disseminating self-serving propaganda that has contorted her into a mirage of who she used to be. This is why she traded her Barbs for the new TPUSA and MAGA audiences who gatekeep keys to citizenship and protection from immigration. These are more pressing issues for her now than ever, especially with the Amsterdam incident.

Amsterdam’s refusal to have her back is the first tell that Europe is rethinking its Nicki Minaj association. They’re asking, “Where is her self-accountability?” She has become a liability who engages in violence and flees when the heat is up. And when she is caught, she blames race or gender as she did in Amsterdam. She doesn’t say, “It was me.” The biggest gap in her story is any remnant of remorse or empathy. The biggest contradictions are her actions compared to her words, and this is why former fans are enraged and confused.

The Barbie Sacrifice

“I saw gay kids, I saw white kids, I saw grunge and pink hair and piercings… I think, because of that, I didn’t put limits on myself or what I was going to put in my raps. I really just wanted to be diverse,” Nicki Minaj told Paper in a 2010 interview. It was a heartfelt acknowledgment and empowerment of the base of Barbs who skyrocketed her career. They had bought every album, transforming the girl from Queens into a multiplatinum global superstar. She turned her back on that audience in a very public, vey disturbing manner.

On X, formerly Twitter, Nicki called veteran news reporter Don Lemon a “cocksucker” who she wanted to see “locked up.” The remarks came on the back of a story Lemon had reported on, centering around a protest in a church. As a prominent long-stay in the news, Lemon has seen similar grotesque identity attacks but not from real Christians. His response was immediate and surgical.

“You don’t care about African Americans, and you’re not an African American… I choose not to pick you, and so should Black people and so should gay people, who shouldn’t buy your music. Clock that,” Lemon said on his show. The audience he and Nicki shared took her remarks personally. They reacted with action.

Her fans sparked up an official Change.org petition to have her deported from the country. In her panicked state, she realized that the petition of over one hundred thousand signatures was more than a symbolic rebuke of her. It was a lightning rod of attention to her criminal behaviors and hypocritical public stances.

How does a person with a revocable green card both create the violence and shame it? How is a person with her legal track record still within the comfortable confines of the country whose laws she celebrates breaking? Nicki can’t justify her criminality which is why she deflected on the UN and TPUSA stages.

Nicki Minaj is a woman desperately fighting to keep her green card and maintain a physical presence in Europe, the only place her tours thrive. She’s stripped away the empathetic elements of her character that once served as the backbone of her fanbase. It’s a volatile attempt to separate herself from her actions, leaving behind a woman torn between reality and her signature deflection. As she noted, she didn’t start with the intent to be a voice for her fans, but she embraced them because they embraced her. When they no longer served her selfish goals, she offered them up as political sacrifice. But what has she learned?

Sitting in her $20 million mansion bought with the hard-earned dollars of her fans, Nicki Minaj is concerned only about keeping what she has and having more. Her loyalties are assets that can be monetized for any movement or idea, even when they collide with her previous worldview. It doesn’t matter if it’s TPUSA or the NAACP. Nicki Minaj isn’t an idol or role model. She is the softest clay molded by a self-serving desire to avoid the fate she earned over decades. She will have her green card, American citizenship and European tour privileges, even if that means torching herself and her values from the core out.

FOLLOW the author Jermaine Reed, Jermaine Reed, MFA for his controversial but real hot takes.