She is the first female rap artist to win a Grammy solo. The magazine "Time" chose them 2018 among the 100 most influential people in the world. After just one album, she is one of the internationally most successful musicians. Now a shot has emerged showing Cardi B before her dizzying career jump. It's an old "Instagram Live" video in which an angry Cardi B talks about how she lived before her fame.

"Nothing was given to me," she says about the time she worked as a stripper in the Bronx. In order to make ends meet, she took men who wanted to have sex with her to the hotel, drugged her and robbed her.

As a stripper, she has actually worked. But the rest? Whether true or a robber gun: The recording caused a stir in the social networks. Under the hashtag #isurvivedcardib quite a few users joked and raved about the confession.

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Cardi B: stripper, robber, superstar

The reactions have a caustic connotation: the hashtag is inspired by "Surviving R.Kelly," the title of the documentary series in which women report that they have been abused by the R'n'B star. Many users did not shy away from comparing Cardi B's use of narcotics with Bill Cosby, who was convicted of sexual assault in 2018 and is currently in jail. In his actions, he sometimes used drugs to numb his victims.

Cardi B has now commented on Instagram on Instagram. She relied on hip hop traditions - and at the same time set herself apart from many of her male genre colleagues. "I'm part of the hip-hop culture where you can talk about where you're from, about the wrong things you needed to do to get where you are today," she replied on Instagram to her fans and villains ,

And while a number of male rappers have used stories like these to cement their credibility as hard guys, the rapper takes a different approach. She deals self-critically with what has happened.

"I never claimed to be perfect or to come from a perfect world with a perfect past," she said. In her past, she had thought she had "had to do it to make ends meet financially." But in her music she never spoke about this part of her past, because she was not proud of it and felt responsible for not glorifying what had happened.