‘I wanted to save Earl’: DMX’s ex-wife Tashera Simmons speaks about the role of trauma in their marriage
TheGrio...
Tashera Simmons was married to DMX for 15 years, but their relationship fell apart due to his drug use, infidelity, and both of their unresolved traumas.
Through her complicated and traumatic marriage to the late rapper DMX, author Tashera Simmons learned an important lesson: Save yourself before you save anybody else.
Simmons went on Angie Martinez’s podcast “IRL” to discuss her relationship and marriage to DMX, which is also the subject matter of her new documentary “X vs. Earl: The Simmons Family Speaks.” She told Martinez that though there was a “pure” and “unique” love between herself and the “Ruff Ryders Anthem” rapper, there was a darker, uglier side to their marriage due to his drug use, infidelity, and the childhood trauma that neither of them had healed from.
“I feel like Earl died very unhappy with a broken heart. Misunderstood,” she said of X, whose real name was Earl Simmons. The Yonkers, New York, artist died in 2021 from complications from a heart attack that reports say was drug-induced.
“And I was so broken from a lot of things that happened with us in the marriage,” Simmons said.
Simmons and X were married from 1999 to 2014. They met as teenagers, both coming from families who had more or less abandoned them, as articulated by Simmons. She told Martinez that at 14, her mother had left her and that her father was verbally abusive. DMX, or Earl, became everything to her.
“Earl almost played every role that you can imagine, from husband, boyfriend, best friend, God. Protector.”
It’s because of this all-encompassing relationship with DMX, which Simmons called “a project to get away from Tashera,” that she stayed as long as she did. Even during the worst betrayals, she tried to make their marriage work.
“I wanted to save Earl,” Simmons said. “I saw the road that Earl was going down. It got very unhealthy for me in this aspect of [him] just starting to step out of our marriage and creating a bunch of different families.”
Simmons said, “Had God not stripped me from that relationship, that marriage, I’d have probably been in a Looney Tune home,” and that now she isn’t afraid to speak about what she has been through, because “To keep everything all bottled up and try to wear a mask like everything is good is not the move.”
When asked how she would speak to another young woman in a similar situation that she was in, Simmons, put it simply: You have to walk away.
“You cannot fix nobody,” she said. “There is nothing that you can do for someone who has been broken, who’s bitter, who doesn’t have the right perspective for their self, there’s no saving. There’s no saving them.”