When Ice Spice sat down with Rolling Stone for her cover story interview last month, she had somewhat of a bone pick with a former friend: “It’s somebody I… called my friend had me open up and be vulnerable with them,” Ice Spice said at the time. “[She] took complete advantage of that for her own benefit.”
She was referring to rapper and content creator Baby Storme, a longtime friend of Ice’s who leaked text messages where she expressed her frustration with Nicki Minaj over negotiations for their Barbie collab. It spawned an entire drama between the two rappers. (Just ask the Barbz.) “That was the saddest part really,” Ice said. “Just feeling used, basically.”
Weeks later, Ice Spice’s friendships are in the eye of the Storme once again (pun intended), but this time involving another burgeoning rapper, Cleotrapa, who, in a six-part TikTok series, accused Ice Spice of humiliating her and mistreating her while she opened for Ice on the Y2K tour this summer.
“Understand that no matter what the opportunity is, nobody should make you feel less than or like shit because they gave you an opportunity,” Cleotrapa says in one of her videos. “It does not give an open way to humiliate you or make you feel less than.”
While the drama started well before the tour, when Storme claimed Ice and Cleotrapa were “fake friends” and that Ice was using Cleo “so she could appear closer to blackness,” things intensified in early September when Ice and Cleotrapa unfollowed her following the end of the tour, and Cleo started airing her grievances.
“Yall thinking I got paid is hilarious. I was played, betrayed & unpaid,” Cleotrapa said on Sept. 2, claiming that Ice Spice had told her expenses would be covered for the tour. She also said that Ice didn’t add her to the billing of the Y2K tour and never shared online that she’d be joining her on the road.
Ice Spice’s response to Cleotrapa’s claims FULL TWITTER SPACE pic.twitter.com/9GEeTxk6im
— She’s Fishy ➐ (@ShesFishy) September 3, 2024
In her videos, Cleotrapa called Ice a “fake friend,” and described several incidents where she felt mistreated by the Y2K rapper. In one instance, Cleotrapa claimed they were in the middle of Texas where there were no restaurants besides a McDonald’s but later found out that Ice Spice and her team had left for a steakhouse and she and another person hadn’t gotten invited. She also claimed that she was denied a chicken salad because she was “not a part of a budget.”
At one point in the TikTok videos, Cleopatra shared screen recordings of the pair’s back-and-forth including a lengthy text message Cleo sent to Ice Spice at the end of the tour.
“I want to apologize to my fans who been tryna say I was the Token black friend,” Cleotrapa wrote. “Its all good yall will never see me with that girl again. That’s it for this & i feel soooooooooo relieved.”
Soon after, Ice Spice addressed Cleotrapa’s allegations in an X space, where she claimed she was “noticing a pattern,” seemingly of friends using her for clout, as she had told Rolling Stone.
“I genuinely was trying to help her,” Ice said, later adding, “Mad last-minute type shit… I’m like, ‘Oh, let me see if Cleo wants to come with me so she could do her songs and stuff like that.’ But that’s what the fuck I get for trying to be a good person. It’s whatever, bro.”
Ice said Cleotrapa had left out details about their experience together, including that the two of them had gone to a theme park and “screamed our vocal cords out” and that the two “had fun together,” including at an Italian restaurant and movie theater. (Ice also shared her dislike for Cleo’s statements calling Ice “soulless and dark.”)
Ice continued the mess by sharing a poll on X asking, “what should I do for dinner” with the options “Steakhouse” or “chicken salad.” Ice’s manager James Rosemond also addressed the drama in a series of now-deleted tweets, writing that “this is what happens when an artist’s team don’t manage their expectations.”
