CULTURE

Cardi B Deletes Her Instagram Account After Facing Backlash to Her Historic Grammy Win

But not before calling out critics of her historic Grammy win.

Feb. 12, 2019

Michael Kovac/Getty Images

Following her history-making Best Rap Album win on Sunday, Cardi B has traded the ‘Gram for a Grammy. Late Monday night, Cardi completely deactivated her Instagram account, apparently prompted by the criticism she faced after becoming the first solo female artist to win the prestigious award.

Before taking down her entire page—bid farewell to all those hilarious memes and her passionate and eloquent discussions of pressing political issues—Cardi posted a video in which she clapped back not only at her detractors, but also seemingly at the BET network (or at least their social media team), which posted a tweet poking fun at Cardi’s now-squashed feud with Nicki Minaj after Cardi’s Grammy win. “It’s not my style for people to put other people down to uplift somebody else. That’s not my style and that’s not what I’m with, and I don’t support that,” Cardi said, likely in reference to BET’s tweet, which has since been deleted and replaced with an apology, and resulted in Minaj and her fellow Young Money artists canceling their participation in upcoming BET Experience concerts and the BET Awards.

In the video, preserved by a fan account before its deletion, Cardi went on to respond to those who say she didn’t deserve the Best Rap Album trophy. “I’ve been taking a lot of shit today. I’m seeing a lot of bullshit today and I saw a lot of shit last night, and I’m sick of this shit. I worked hard for my motherfucking album,” she said. “I remember last year, when I didn’t win for ‘Bodak Yellow,’ everybody was like, ‘Cardi got snubbed, Cardi got snubbed!’ Now, this year, it’s a fucking problem?”

After listing off Invasion of Privacy‘s many impressive achievements—”every chart that there was, my album was always top 10″—she described how she worked around the clock, often staying in the recording studio for days at a time, to finish the album. On top of that, she reminded viewers, at the time, she was already pregnant with her daughter Kulture, and “everybody was harassing me, like, ‘You’re not gonna do it, we know you’re pregnant, your career is over.'” After giving that final mic drop of a message time to sink in, Cardi deleted her account. (Her Twitter feed, meanwhile, still remains active.)

Though she’s an avid social media user, Cardi’s Instagram silence isn’t totally unprecedented. In her new cover interview for the March 2019 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, the rapper hinted that she was thinking about taking a step back from the platforms that made her famous. “Sometimes I’ll see something online and it’ll piss me off, and then my baby will start crying or something, and it’s like, ‘You know what? I’ve got to deal with the milk. Forget this,'” she said. “I’ve noticed that every time you respond, you just make things worse, so I’m over it. I’m just over it. I really don’t need it, and sometimes it just brings chaos to my brain,” she continued. “I can stay off social media. I’ve been trying.”