Benzino is finally speaking openly about the emotional distance between him and his daughter, Coi Leray, and it’s clear the situation still weighs heavy on him. During a sit-down with Carlos King, the former Love & Hip Hop star unpacked years of tension, missed signals, and public fallouts that have kept him and Coi from being the daddy-daughter duo they once were.
Carlos didn’t waste time getting straight to the heart of it. “Where do you think things went wrong between you and Coi? I mean, you were recently disinvited to her baby shower…” he asked.
Benzino admitted he genuinely doesn’t have the answers.
“I don’t know, man. I think me being in the light, being a street guy with kids, plays into it. We don’t have a manual. We just go by what we know,” he said. “Since I’m older, I do have morality and understanding from my mother and father… but I want them to be better than me.”
He also shared that Coi always had a protective streak when it came to the women he dated.
“One thing about Coi… Coi is gonna grill any chick I’m with when I’m not there,” he explained. “She’ll wait until I’m there, and she’ll grill the hell out of her. I remember Karlie Redd came back and told me this… Coi grilled Karlie too.”
Still, Benzino believes some of their disconnect came from him not noticing what his daughter needed emotionally.
“I probably didn’t pay no attention. Even when they told me, I probably just didn’t pay it no attention,” he said. “As long as I have her, she’s with me, she’s having fun, she’s getting money… everything’s cool. She’s around. I don’t know how we got here.”
Carlos then brought up the first time the public realized something was wrong: Coi’s music, where she expressed feeling abandoned by her father.
Benzino said he was blindsided.
“I didn’t know how to handle this… like, on the internet. I didn’t see this coming,” he shared. “There was no manual or something I could look in, ask ChatGPT, ‘Hey, what do I do?’ I didn’t know what to do. My feelings were hurt.”
He regrets responding online and contributing to the public nature of their fallout.
“I shouldn’t have did that,” he admitted. “I never knew she felt that way about me. Anything I did was out of love… and anything I might not have did right was just me not knowing. I didn’t do anything on purpose to hurt anybody.”
Now that Coi has given birth to her first child, Benzino says the distance feels even heavier.
“It’s just a touchy situation because she just had a baby… and I haven’t seen her,” he revealed. “I get the pictures once they come out on the blogs, like anybody else. I just wish it would stop. Just go back to being normal again.”
Whether the two eventually reconcile remains to be seen, but Benzino’s interview shows a father hoping for peace, healing, and another chance with his daughter and new grandchild.
Coi has yet to respond to this latest interview with her dad. Watch the clip from the interview below: