Keke Palmer Reflects on Relationship with Older Man While Starring on Nickelodeon As a Teen

While promoting her upcoming memoir, Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative, in an interview with PEOPLE, actress Keke Palmer opened up about a relationship she had with an older man while she was a teenager starring in Nickelodeon's True Jackson VP. In her book, Palmer, now, 31, reflected on the "power dynamic" of dating a man five years her senior. "I was 15, he was 20," she told PEOPLE of the unnamed boyfriend. "I was trying to balance between being really young, but also feeling quite mature. If I thought it was inappropriate, then I wouldn't have done it." "Obviously I shouldn't have been 15 dating no 20-year-old," Palmer continued, "but in my mind it was like 'I got a full-time job. . . . Can't nobody understand me but a grown man.' But he knew there was a lot of stuff that there's no damn way for me to understand at damn 15." The Nope star said she kept the relationship a secret from both her parents and the public during the years they were together, sharing that the relationship ended when she was 20. "I wasn't mentally able to process and understand things that would've made that relationship appropriate," she said. In her memoir, Palmer writes, per PEOPLE, "The power dynamic put me in a place that harmed me in ways I couldn't have known. I didn't have the language or the strength to accept that who he met was a child, not the woman I wanted to become." While speaking to the outlet, she said she didn't experience "genuine love" until she was much older. "It wasn't until I was a real grown woman, and even then we know we've still got more time to grow," she recalled. "But by 26, 27, 28, I had finally experienced, I think, genuine love." "Not that I didn't love that [other] person, but it wasn't until I'd felt what it was like for someone to love me back and to actually give me respect, that I've realized that relationship was wrong," added Palmer, who dated Darius Jackson from 2021 until 2023. (The former couple welcomed son Leo in February 2023.) In that same cover story with PEOPLE, the Akeelah and the Bee actress opened up about allegedly being abused by a peer when she was five years old. "People don't really think about child-on-child molestation, but it’s something that exists," said Palmer, who writes about the alleged abuse in her book. "I felt weird and violated, but I didn’t really know how to place it. I just knew I had all these weird feelings and thoughts, and I felt a little bit out of control and overwhelmed." It wasn't until years later, when she was 12, that she realized how her past experience had impacted her. "I was reading a book about sexual abuse, and it said all these things about anxiety and hyper-sexualization," she told PEOPLE. "All of this stuff that I attributed to me but really it was because of what I had experienced." Looking back, Palmer said, "It wasn't about blaming that other child. We don't know sometimes what has happened to us, especially if it doesn't look the way that the world has told you it looks like." Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative is out November 19. The book is available to pre-order now.