Former Bad Boy artist Jamal “Shyne” Barrow recently appeared on the Drink Champs podcast and delved into the backstory behind his rise to fame, but the elephant in the room was the topic of the infamous 1999 shooting at a New York City club and subsequent trial involving him and Sean “Diddy” Combs, which he addressed during the interview.
On numerous occasions in the past the rapper-turned-politician has spoken out against his former CEO, who avoided a prison bid while Shyne was sentenced to 10 years for his role in the shooting, however, he’s since had a change of heart, revealing that he no longer holds any ill will toward Diddy for the situation.
“I don’t really blame that on him now as much as I did then,” Shyne explained to N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN. “Because I did go through a stage of bitterness. But in retrospect, I blame it more on the lawyers that were advising him. Because his lawyers were there to secure a ‘not guilty’ verdict by any means.”
The “Bad Boyz” rapper also pointed to Diddy’s age at the time and explained how his lack of experience in the streets contributed to certain decisions he made in an attempt to vindicate himself. “He’s a $100 million corporation and they looked at me as the enemy,” he said of Diddy’s legal team and inner circle. “This is how many years ago? This is 20-something years ago. Puff is still young relatively. So he’s much younger then and it’s a lot of pressure. He’s about to lose everything. I’m about to lose everything. I’m from that though. Diddy is a musician, but he wasn’t from that. So his response shouldn’t be expected to be my response. When your lawyers are misleading you and misguiding you, that’s how everything fell apart. And he said that to me. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have never listened to those lawyers.’ I forgave him. It was traumatic. I would forgive him and then you might hear me a few months later going in on him. That was over a decade ago and I was in a different space then.”
On Dec. 27, 1999, Shyne, Diddy, and Diddy’s then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were attending Club New York in midtown Manhattan when a verbal altercation between Diddy and another clubgoer got heated, causing Shyne to pull out a gun and fire shots into the area, wounding three club patrons as a result. Diddy was eventually found not guilty of gun charges stemming from the shooting, while Barrow was convicted of attempted murder, assault, and reckless endangerment and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Shyne was released from prison in 2009 and deported to his country of birth Belize, but has maintained a relationship with Diddy, who lent him public support after government officials in Belize attempted to amend a law in order to keep ex-cons from running for office after he was elected the Leader of the Opposition at the House of Representatives in 2020.
“Diddy lost it when he heard that,” noted Shyne. “He got the REVOLT people involved, he got the publicists, he got his legislative friends. He said, ‘We can’t let this happen.’ Puff, to me, totally redeemed himself.”
Watch the full Drink Champs interview with Shyne below:
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