Usher and Keke Palmer reflected on that viral 2023 moment they shared and the relationship drama that followed.
On Tuesday’s episode of the “Baby, It’s Keke Palmer” podcast, Palmer spoke about seeing Usher in concert for the first time in 2023.
“My reaction [to the show] was just like, ‘I can’t believe it, I haven’t seen anybody perform like this in such a long time,’” Palmer said. “Now, obviously, everybody went crazy. We caused some ruckus in my relationship.”
Usher responded, “Yeah, we did.”
During the July 2023 concert, Usher invited Palmer, wearing a sheer black dress, to dance with him on stage. A video of the dance went viral online, and Palmer’s then-boyfriend Darius Jackson expressed his disapproval.
“It’s the outfit tho… you a mom,” he wrote, in part, on social media.
Usher, who had a residency in Las Vegas at the time, regularly invited people on stage to dance with him, including Issa Rae and Taraji P. Henson. But Palmer’s participation made news because of Jackson’s reaction.
“I don’t want to take any responsibility for breaking everybody’s home up, but that wasn’t the purpose and point,” he said while Palmer laughed. “It was for you to have a good time with your girls. Come out there and just enjoy.”
He added that if Palmer didn’t wear the dress, he wouldn’t have seen her.
In October, Palmer told People she was “speechless” at Jackson’s reaction.
“I was at a photo shoot and everybody was looking all weird,” she told People. “I was like, ‘Are y’all good?’ And then I randomly was on my phone, and I saw,” she says. “It was so crazy. I didn’t want to engage with something that wasn’t reality and fan the fire.”
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A few months after the Usher concert, Palmer filed a restraining order against Jackson, citing “many instances of physical violence.”
Usher and Palmer remain friends, and after the viral dance, Palmer appeared in Usher’s music video for his song “Boyfriend.”
“I know it was a hot moment for you, and I was like, ‘You know what? When life feeds you lemons, you make lemonade,’” Usher said on the podcast about Palmer starring in his music video. “I think that this could be something positive and actually just shine a little bit of fun on it, and allowing us to really do something that I think could be fun is the purpose and point of it. Let’s do something that just takes the mind off of it and just have a good time. Don’t focus on the drama.”