Warning: Discussion of pregnancy loss.
You know Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist Eve? She just opened up about her fertility journey, and it explains all the mystery about her health from years ago.
While her lyricism with albums like Let There Be Eve…Ruff Ryders’ First Lady (1999) and Scorpion (2001) put her on the map; she’s also made a name for herself on television.
From 2003 to 2006, she played Shelley Williams on the TV sitcom Eve.
From 2017 to 2020, she was cohost of the CBS Daytime talk show The Talk.
In 2021, she returned to the small screen as Brianna, aka “Professor Sex,” in the ABC drama Queens.
It was during her time on the two sitcoms that she had two separate experiences with pregnancy that she’s kept relatively secret until now for a specific reason.
Eve is married to British entrepreneur Maximillion Cooper, and they share a 2-year-old son, Wilde. Maximillion also has four children from a previous marriage.
In an interview with People, Eve shared that her journey to motherhood had many ups and downs while filming her TV shows. “Having my son has a lot to do with feeling like I can talk about this past stuff, because here is — literally — my future,” Eve said. “I don’t have anything to chase beyond the things that I want to build for him, us as a family.”
Eve struggled to become pregnant after marrying Maximillion in 2014. “You question yourself, your body, the universe, God, so many things,” she told People. “I told my husband [about the miscarriage] when we got close, but never ever spoke about it in public, not even [while I was hosting] The Talk.”
“I couldn’t tell anybody then because it was such a new pregnancy,” she said. “I, one hundred percent, was acting like an absolute crazy person. It was baking in LA, so I was asking for ice to be put down my back. When I finally told the girls that I was pregnant months into shooting, they were like, ‘That’s why you were acting crazy. Thank God that you weren’t a psycho diva.'”
In 2022, Eve gave birth to Wilde, but this wasn’t her first pregnancy during a TV show, and her past explains why she initially kept it so private.
In an excerpt obtained by People from her new memoir Who’s That Girl?, Eve explained why she lied about her first pregnancy while filming her sitcom. “It was 2006, and I was still filming my Eve TV series, when I found out that I was pregnant. It was called a tubal pregnancy, where the embryonic sac ruptured in my one fallopian tube. It’s also known as an ectopic pregnancy. I had to have emergency surgery and stop filming the show for two weeks.”
“For years, I never grieved losing my first baby. I didn’t know how to, but I eventually learned. I had to speak to that baby and acknowledge their existence. I had to forgive myself and know that what had happened wasn’t my fault, that I deserved to be a mother, and that I was ready to bring a baby into this world down here,” Eve wrote. “And his name would be Wilde Wolfe.”
Eve’s memoir Who’s That Girl? is out on Sept. 17.