“Nelly and Ashanti are welcoming their first baby together,” Us Weekly reported on Monday.
However, representatives for Ashanti declined to provide comment to The Times regarding the report and representatives for Nelly did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The rumors first began after over the weekend when Ashanti and Nelly attended an event together in the “Ride Wit Me” rapper’s native St. Louis. At the function, Ashanti and Nelly both playfully caressed the “Rock Wit U (Awww Baby)” singer’s stomach, as seen in a TMZ video.
If the rumors are true, Ashanti would be pregnant with her first child and the “Hot in Herre” rapper would be expecting his third — he has two grown children, Chanelle and Cornell Haynes III, from his previous relationship with Channetta Valentine.
Nelly, 49, and Ashanti, 43, dated on and off for about 11 years before breaking up in 2013. After sparking romance rumors for months, Nelly directly addressed speculation about the couple’s rekindled relationship in a September interview with “Love and Hip Hop’s” Rasheeda on her “Boss Moves” TV show.
“Yeah, we cool again,” he said in a clip, which was re-posted by the Shade Room. “I think it surprised both of us, though. It wasn’t anything that …[was] planned. I think we’re both pretty much doing what we do.”
He added that time and distance appeared to help him and the “What’s Luv?” singer get to a better place.
“Sometimes being separate you understand one another more,” he said. “You could be like, ‘Yo, let me see exactly what they see.’ You know, because we all can be defensive sometimes in our own relationships. And we know we wrong but we going to stand on it. But we all a victim to that.”
Ashanti — who said in 2022 that she was ready to “slow down” and have kids — acknowledged the romance on Instagram stories as she geared up for the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards where she showed off a clutch that was emblazoned with a photo of her and the hip-hop star.
“So… in this pic, we exchanged numbers at the VMAs in 2003… 20 years ago lol …” she wrote, sharing a close-up of their faces on the purse. The “Always on Time” singer readily posed with the bag on the pink carpet when she arrived at the awards show in New Jersey.