Mary J Blige and Kendu Issacs were supposed to be each other’s happily ever after, but unfortunately, their love ended in divorce. While Blige has once again turned her sadness into platinum records, Kendu has quietly been off the radar rebuilding his life. He’s opened up about the health issues he faced following their divorce and how losing Mary J. Blige resulted in him being hospitalized.
Mary J Blige and Kendu had a very messy split, plagued with rumors of fighting, infidelity, and a struggle over Blige’s riches. They originally announced their split in 2016, with blogs reporting that Issacs was fully using Mary’s money to fund his mistress’s lifestyle, including trips, shopping sprees, and private jets. In total, he spent $420k in travel expenses. The divorce nearly wiped Blige out, leaving her $10 million dollars in debt. She was also ordered to pay alimony for Kendu and child support for his children that she helped raise.
Blige rebounded and put it into the music, forced to go back on tour to make up for the money she lost in the divorce. Luckily for Blige, her “brothers” in the music industry are some of the most powerful in the game. Dr. Dre tapped her for the Super Bowl Halftime Show, which helped drum up hype for her album Good Morning Gorgeous and its supporting tour, which was announced days later. The project is currently nominated for several major categories at this year’s Grammys, including song and album of the year.
Meanwhile, 50 Cent hired Mary to star in one of his many Power spinoffs, Power Book II: Ghost. Fifty reportedly also advanced her on her show salary so she could get out of debt sooner. Blige is now opening up about how the divorce nearly left her homeless and how she had to hold on to faith to get her to this point where she is back on top of the world and gearing up for even bigger heights in 2023.
Meanwhile, many have assumed that Kendu was living it up thanks to all that alimony money he was awarded. The music industry veteran had cashed in big time, $30k a month, to be exact. He also came out of it with a young girlfriend, singer Starshell. While she was initially a protege he was grooming with Mary, at some point, things became intimate, and the two began having an affair. Starshell took a social media sabbatical before reemerging with a new man and family, clearly not dating Kendu anymore.
And as for Issacs, he ended up in the hospital back in 2018 during the thick of the divorce. He claimed to have “experienced physical manifestations of stress and emotional distress from this matter, which had caused him to become hospitalized.” Issacs said at the time that he was “unemployable” due to the split and required the alimony to make ends meet since leaving Blige put him on everyone’s bad side.
These days he is pretty quiet on social media, only posting sporadically and mostly posts about his daughter, Briana Latrise Kamara.