Sitting down with his former Hot 97 boss Karlie Hustle for a tell-all interview, Mister Cee opened up about his departure from the station and decision to announce the move live on-air. During the sit-down the longtime radio deejay also addressed the scandal that forced his hand in 2013 and admitted to being “scared as shit” with regard to his latest resignation.
“Honest to God it wasn’t hard because it was something I thought about five years prior,” Mister Cee said when asked about how long he planned the announcement. “It was on my mind [for five years] that I wanted to leave Hot 97 but the one person that kept holding me back—not holding me back, the person that kept saying, ‘Let’s stick this out’—was Flex. Funkmaster Flex was just like, ‘Please, let’s ride this out.’ My whole thing was that I didn’t wanna be on Hot 97 at 50-years old. I’m 48. No matter how much you could be in a great situation for the moment, are you gonna be in that good situation five years from now? As much as people may look at it as Hot 97 is all I know, I been there for so long, ‘Can he take the jump and do something else?'”
As for his decision to surprise fans as well as Hot 97 staff and leadership with an on-air resignation announcement, Cee hinted that it was a way of combatting the normal aging out of employees.
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“So many times in corporate America we’re the one’s that get that tap on the shoulder like, ‘It’s your time,'” he said. “It never really happens [in the reverse] where you kind of dictate. I didn’t do it out of disrespect to the company because I will always love Hot 97. When I resigned that day I kept saying that. I wanted to leave on my own terms…I resigned November 21, November 20 [I knew]. I did a party the night before in Long Island. Me and my boy Hollywood, we had left the club. And I told him in the car, I said, ‘Tomorrow I’m doing it.’ He was the only one that knew.”
Before addressing his post-departure career options, Cee said he couldn’t sleep well for weeks.
“I was scared as shit,” he said. “I literally slept every night for say two weeks with my heart just fluttering. Couldn’t sleep all the way through the night. I literally slept for two weeks like that, not knowing what my next move was gonna be or just the feat of the unknown.”
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Later in the interview, the current RADIO 103.9 personality outlined the scandal that kept his name in headlines beginning in 2011.
“Back in 2011 I got arrested for getting oral sex by a transexual,” he said. “I got arrested two or three times for it. It started in 2011 and then it occasionally happened between 2011 and 2013. When all of that was going on, first I was in denial, telling everybody I didn’t do it, that I wasn’t involved. Once I finally had the interview with Ebro and Flex acting a fool and me just being honest with everything, I just had the attitude like I don’t give a fuck what anybody tries to do to me from here on out. If I can withstand this, I can withstand anything.”
Watch the full interview below:
