Snoop Dogg

The one major rap star who has said on the record that he pimped, for roughly two years around 2003–2004, then walked away.

This record is not about Snoop Dogg's career. It concerns a single, unusually well-documented episode: a period of roughly two years, centred on 2003 and 2004, in which the rapper has repeatedly and publicly said he worked as a pimp. The primary source is a 2006 Rolling Stone cover story, headlined "Snoop Dogg: America's Most Lovable Pimp," in which he described the activity in the first person. He told the magazine that pimping had been a childhood fascination, that he had won a Halloween contest in tenth grade dressed as a pimp, and that once he took it up as an adult "it became fun." He said it lasted about two years and intensified after he filed for divorce from his wife, Shante Broadus, in May 2004.

The public face of that period was his association with Bishop Don Magic Juan, the Chicago pimp turned self-styled preacher who founded the annual Players Ball in 1974 and, according to a 2000 Salon report by Denise Dowling, presided over its "Pimp of the Year" voting. Rolling Stone reported that Snoop attended several Players Balls, brought twelve women to one in Detroit, and received the Bishop's lifetime achievement award there. At the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards he walked the red carpet with two women on leashes, an image that circulated for years; in 2006 he told Rolling Stone he had done it to show "how real pimps do it." He distinguished himself from what he called a "gorilla pimp," saying he did not beat the women and was "more finesse with it."

The episode ended, by his own account, when older pimps at a Players Ball told him to go home to his wife. Touré, who wrote the Rolling Stone story, later recalled Snoop saying the older men told him "you've done your time here. Go back to your family." He halted the divorce, and told the magazine in 2006, "I'm into the family, I'm into this now." In a May 2013 Rolling Stone interview with Jonah Weiner, reported at the time by NME, LAist and The Root, he went further about the mechanics: he said he assembled "an organization," that during a Playboy-sponsored tour a bus of ten women followed him from city to city, and that athletes and entertainers were among the customers. He also claimed he let the women keep the money, saying "it was never about the money; it was about the fascination of being a pimp." The women themselves have not been identified in any reporting and have never spoken publicly, so their side of this account is absent from the record.

Critics have treated the story as more than colour. In December 2010 Malika Saada Saar of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights wrote in The Daily Beast that Snoop's public embrace of the Players Ball, where he was honoured as "Hardest Working Player," glamorised a trade whose victims she had seen as young as eleven. The Root's Demetria Lucas D'Oyley in 2013 called his nostalgia for the period troubling for a married father. The archive records both the account and the objection. What is documented is what Snoop said, when he said it, and to whom; what remains undocumented is whether the women's experience matched his description of it.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr.

BORN
Long Beach, California, October 20, 1971

STATUS
Living

ERA
2003–2004 (the documented episode); public statements 2006–2013

ASSOCIATED WITH
Long Beach; Death Row Records; No Limit Records; Bishop Don Magic Juan; the Players Ball

STANDING
Documented