Just one day after going Instagram-official with her new boyfriend Kenneth Petty who, yeah, happens to be a sex offender, Nicki Minaj is defending him in the comments section. Before the celebrity couple took their relationship to social-media-status, the singer was already getting heat for her new man — and now she’s apparently not taking it at all. Instead, she’s doubling down and defending the 40-year-old who was convicted of and served time for first-degree attempted rape.

After the news broke that Nicki’s boo Kenneth had been found guilty of using a “knife/cutting instrument” to attempt to rape a 16-year-old girl when he was about 16, one of the singer’s stans came into her Instagram comments to defend her new man. “Wait, y’all calling this man a rapist, but it happened in 1994, meaning he was 16 or 17 & the girl was a 16-year-old… Must’ve been a white girl,” the fan wrote, implying that race relations had more to do with the conviction than Kenneth’s actual actions. Nicki was quick to agree, writing back, “He was 15, she was 16… in a relationship. But go awf, Internet.”

The Shade Room grabbed screenshots of the comments. In them, Nicki continued, “Y’all can’t run my life. Y’all can’t even run y’all own life,” before thanking the fan who’d defended her convicted sex offender boyfriend. That wasn’t all Nicki had to say, though. She decided she wasn’t done with the drama quite yet. In fact, she chose to lean into it instead of waiting quietly to see if the moment would pass. Instead, she posted two new photos of the couple together.

In the first photo, Kenneth is holding Nicki up as she takes a selfie of them in the mirror. In the second photo, they’re on a bed together as the singer pops her booty up and sticks her tongue out. This time, her boyfriend is the one taking the photo as she poses nude or nearly nude. “Oh they wanna talk?” she wrote in the caption of the Instagram album. “Let’s give’m smthn to talk about. *Shania voice*” Presumably, she meant the Bonnie Rait song “Something To Talk About,” but confusing two female country singers is so the least of her problems right now.

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Oh they wanna talk? Let’s give’m smthn to talk about. 😜👅 *Shania voice*

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At the same time, though, many fans aren’t exactly surprised by the move. After all, the singer recently worked with Tekashi69, who faced his own sex offender conviction after he was found guilty of using a 13-year-old child in a sexual performance he recorded and that later surfaced online. Back in 2017, her older brother was also found guilty of raping his stepdaughter when she was only 11 years old. Supporting a sex offender isn’t exactly new for Nicki — but if anyone had qualms about whether or not they were #TeamCardi in the rappers’ ongoing feud, well, this should certainly help settle the debate.

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