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Nicki Minaj's Husband Pleads Guilty To Failing To Register As A Sex Offender In California
Kenneth Petty, who is scheduled to be sentenced in January, could face up to 10 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release.
Nicki Minaj’s husband, Kenneth Petty, has pleaded guilty for failing to register as a sex offender in California.
Petty entered the plea Thursday during a virtual hearing with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, according to court documents obtained by People.
Petty, who married Minaj in 2019, is scheduled to be sentenced in January.
He could face up to 10 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release.
The same day Petty entered the plea in court, Minaj announced on Twitter that she had pulled out of a scheduled performance at the MTV’s Video Music Awards this Sunday.
“I just pulled out,” she wrote in response to a fan’s question about the performance. “I’ll explain why another day.”
The rapper vowed that next year “we there baby.”
Petty was arrested in November of 2019 after authorities discovered during a routine traffic stop that he had not registered as a sex offender in California, although he was living in the state at the time, NBC News reports.
He was initially released after posting a $20,000 bond, but was arrested again in connection to the incident after he was indicted by a federal grand jury in March of 2020.
That time he posted a $100,000 bail and was released from federal custody.
By law, Petty is required to register as a sex offender wherever he is living after he was convicted of first-degree attempted rape in New York in 1995. Authorities said Petty, who was 16 years old at the time, sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl and was classified as a level two sex offender, meaning he was a “moderate risk of repeat offense,” according to People.
Petty served four years in a New York state prison for the crime.
His alleged victim, who has publicly identified herself as Jennifer Hough, sued Petty and Minaj last month after accusing the couple of trying to intimidate her to retract her allegation that Petty had raped her at knife point in 1994, according to The New York Times.
Although he was initially charged with first-degree rape, he later agreed to plead guilty to attempted rape as part of a plea deal.
Hough has alleged in the lawsuit that shortly after Petty’s arrest for failing to register as a sex offender, her family members started to receive communication from people who claimed to be connected to the pair, offering money in exchange for a retraction of the allegations.
Hough continues to insist that she was raped and has refused to back down from her own account.
“If I lie now and say that I lied then, you know what that does?” she told The Times. “Do you know what that’s going to say to my two little girls, or even my sons?”
Petty has yet to comment on his recent guilty plea for failing to register as a sex offender.
