Nelly and Ashanti first laid eyes on each other in January 2003, while both were attending an event announcing the nominations for that year’s Grammy Awards. Interviewed by VH1’s “Behind the Music” (as reported by People), Ashanti shared her distinctive memory of the moment when they came face to face. “The first time I met Nelly he asked me for my autograph,” she recalled, clarifying, “but I think he was being sarcastic and I remember writing it down on the program.”
As it happened, photographers on hand at the event captured the moment for posterity, in which Ashanti is leaning down, pen in hand, to put her signature on Nelly’s program. “That picture has been in so many publications as something else, but it all started out as a joke,” she said, before adamantly pointing out that her signature was the only thing she wrote down for Nelly at that moment in time. “For the record,” Ashanti added, “it took him a long time to get my number.”
Read Related Also: House committee to probe UN agency for Palestinian refugees for suspected Hamas ties: ‘Troubling connection’
She wasn’t kidding. The next time the two were seen together was nearly three years later, when the “Ride Wit Me” rapper was spotted attending her 25th birthday party in October 2005. They didn’t make their red-carpet debut as a couple until the following July, when Ashanti brought him as her date to the premiere of the movie “John Tucker Must Die.”
