Ashanti is reportedly expecting a baby, baby, baby, baby, baby with her partner and fellow music star Nelly.
“Nelly and Ashanti are welcoming their first baby together,” Us Weekly reported on Monday.
However, representatives for Ashanti declined to comment to The Times about the report, and representatives for Nelly did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The rumors began over the weekend when Ashanti and Nelly attended an event together in St. Louis, the hometown of the “Ride Wit Me” rapper. At the performance, Ashanti and Nelly playfully caressed the “Rock Wit U (Awww Baby)” singer’s stomach, as seen in a TMZ video.
If the rumors are true, Ashanti would be pregnant with her first child and the “Hot in Herre” rapper would be expecting her third: he has two older children, Chanelle and Cornell Haynes III, from his previous relationship with Channetta Valentine.
Nelly, 49, and Ashanti, 43, dated on and off for about 11 years before splitting in 2013. After sparking romance rumors for months, Nelly directly addressed speculation about the couple’s rekindled relationship in a September interview with “Love and Hip Hop”’s Rasheeda on her TV show “Boss Moves.”
“Yeah, we cooled down again,” he said in a clip, which was reposted by Shade Room. “However, I think it surprised us both. It was nothing that…[was] planned. “I think we’re both pretty much doing what we do.”
He added that time and distance seemed to help him and the “What is Luv?” The singer reaches a better place.
“Sometimes, being apart, you understand each other better,” he said. “You could say, ‘Let me see exactly what they see.’ You know, because we can all get defensive sometimes in our own relationships. And we know we were wrong, but we are going to stand firm. But we are all victims of that.”
Ashanti, who said in 2022 that she was ready to “slow down” and have children, acknowledged the romance on Instagram Stories while preparing for the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards, where she showed off a clutch bag adorned with a photo of her . and hip-hop star.
“So… in this photo, we exchanged numbers at the VMAs in 2003… 20 years ago lol…” she wrote, sharing a close-up of their faces in the bag. The “Always on Time” singer posed easily with the bag on the pink carpet when she arrived at the awards show in New Jersey.
