Teyana Taylor to Pharrell: ‘You Didn’t Protect Me’

As a young teenager, Teyana Taylor signed a recording contract with Pharrell Williams three years before the world got to see her on the MTV show, My Super Sweet 16. She has recently revealed that during her time as a signed artist, she didn’t feel protected and felt like the music producer kind of just fed her “to the wolves.”

On a recent appearance on the Angie Martinez IRL Podcast, the singer describes her thoughts about being signed to Star Trek Entertainment when she was only 15 years old. Taylor states that she needed for the label owner to fight harder for her since she was new to the industry and wanted guidance at that time.

“For me, that 15-year-old, that girl just needed you to fight a little harder. You know what I’m saying? Needed you to maybe push even if you didn’t have the strength to,” she tells Angie Martinez. “I just needed you to push for me more.”

She also eluded to his laidback persona that everyone knows him for as a reason she felt he wasn’t there for her like she needed him to be. She called him one of the “easiest people in the whole wide world.” Yet, when there were people who started coming around and mishandling her and “started going into the cookie jar” she felt he didn’t protect her.

“He’s not confrontational at all. He’s literally just one of the easiest people in the whole wide world, you know what I’m saying? So, it’s not like he didn’t protect me, it’s just that a lot of hands started going into the cookie jar, and he didn’t, you know like. To me, as a 15-year-old, it was, you didn’t protect me. You let everyone mishandle me. I’m signed to you and you let everybody get in the way and everybody break us apart. You didn’t protect me.”