Keke Palmer on ‘Inappropriate’ Relationship with Older Man While Filming Nickelodeon Show: ‘Nothing Makes It Right’ (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Keke Palmeris opening up about her happy life now after healing from toxic relationships.

Though fans are well aware of the turmoil the she went through while dating her most recent boyfriendDarius Jackson, the star, 31, and author of upcoming new bookMaster of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative, also reflects back on a lesser known relationship that took place early on in her career and negatively impacted her life.

Palmer fell in love for the first time amid her rise to fame as the star of Nickelodeon’s hit sitcomTrue Jackson VP, on which she played a teen corporate executive. “I had a great time doingTrue Jackson VP, but it was also a very stressful, difficult, depressive time,” she says in this week’s cover story.

Keke Palmer as ‘True Jackson VP’.Everett

She began dating an older man. “I was 15, he was 20,” Palmer says of the partner she doesn’t name. “I was trying to balance between being really young, but also feeling quite mature. If I thought it was inappropriate, then I wouldn’t have done it.”

Adds Palmer, “Obviously I shouldn’t have been 15 dating no 20-year-old,” she says, “but in my mind it was like ‘I got a full-time job. . . . Can’t nobody understand me but a grown man.’ Butheknew there was a lot of stuff that there’s no damn way for me to understand at damn 15.”

Keke Palmer and castmates on ‘True Jackson VP’.Photo credit: Nickelodeon

For years she hid the relationship, which lasted until she herself was 20, from her parents and the world. She’s since come to realize “I wasn’t mentally able to process and understand things that would’ve made that relationship appropriate.”

Palmer writes inMaster of Me, “The power dynamic put me in a place that harmed me in ways I couldn’t have known. I didn’t have the language or the strength to accept that who he met was a child, not the woman I wanted to become.”

Keke Palmer.Phylicia J. L. Munn

Phylicia J. L. Munn

For more on the highs and lows of Keke Palmer’s life in the spotlight, pick up this week’s issue, available Friday.

She continues, “Not that I didn’t love that [other] person, but it wasn’t until I’d felt what it was like for someone to love me back and to actually give me respect, that I’ve realized that relationship was wrong.”

source: people.com