Keke Palmer talks about an inappropriate relationship with an older man...

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...while she was filming a Nickelodeon show

https://people.com/keke-palmer-was-i...lusive-8736482

Keke Palmer on ‘Inappropriate’ Relationship with Older Man While Filming Nickelodeon Show: ‘Nothing Makes It Right’ (Exclusive)​

The former child star and award-winning actress opens up to PEOPLE about her first love and why she now knows the relationship was deeply problematic

By Janine Rubenstein

Published on October 30, 2024 12:00PM EDT

Keke Palmer is opening up about her happy life now after healing from toxic relationships.

Though fans are well aware of the turmoil the she went through while dating her most recent boyfriend Darius Jackson, the star, 31, and author of upcoming new book Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative, also reflects back on a lesser known relationship that took place early on in her career and negatively impacted her life.

Palmer fell in love for the first time amid her rise to fame as the star of Nickelodeon's hit sitcom True Jackson VP, on which she played a teen corporate executive. "I had a great time doing True Jackson VP, but it was also a very stressful, difficult, depressive time,” she says in this week's cover story.

She began dating an older man. "I was 15, he was 20," Palmer says of the partner she doesn't name. “I was trying to balance between being really young, but also feeling quite mature. If I thought it was inappropriate, then I wouldn't have done it."

Adds Palmer, "Obviously I shouldn’t have been 15 dating no 20-year-old," she says, "but in my mind it was like ‘I got a full-time job. . . . Can’t nobody understand me but a grown man.’ But he knew there was a lot of stuff that there's no damn way for me to understand at damn 15."

For years she hid the relationship, which lasted until she herself was 20, from her parents and the world. She’s since come to realize “I wasn’t mentally able to process and understand things that would’ve made that relationship appropriate.”

Palmer writes in Master of Me, "The power dynamic put me in a place that harmed me in ways I couldn't have known. I didn't have the language or the strength to accept that who he met was a child, not the woman I wanted to become."

It took her time to realize the damage that was done. "It wasn't until I was a real grown woman, and even then we know we've still got more time to grow. But by 26, 27, 28, I had finally experienced, I think, genuine love," she says of ex Jackson. The two welcomed son Leo in February 2023.

For more on the highs and lows of Keke Palmer's life in the spotlight, pick up this week's issue, available Friday.

She continues, "Not that I didn't love that [other] person, but it wasn't until I'd felt what it was like for someone to love me back and to actually give me respect, that I've realized that relationship was wrong."

Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative by Keke Palmer comes out Nov. 19 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.