Cardi B and Offset’s Messy Breakup: A Timeline

Cardi B and Offset have managed to end the year with a breakup saga to rival all of the romantic ups-and-downs 2018 has seen (and there have been many).

On December 5, it was announced that Cardi B and Offset would be filing for a divorce after barely a year of marriage. The breakup was made to seem amicable (Cardi B spoke fondly of Offset, saying they both still harbor “a lot of love for each other” and “it’s nobody’s fault”), but many fans who have been following their roller-coaster relationship pinned the breakup on Offset’s alleged cheating scandal. He later posted a pleading apology video on Instagram, insisting that he did not cheat but did “entertain” it, and claiming that his only birthday wish this year would include forgiveness from his soon-to-be ex-wife and to spend the holidays with his daughter, Kulture.

In response to the social media hullaballoo concerning Offset’s behavior and Instagram plea, Cardi B posted two videos of her own. In the now-deleted clips, the rapper requested that her fans be kind to Offset regardless of the current status of their relationship. “I’m not saying that I’m getting back together with him. I just don’t like that bashing online thing,” she stated in one video.

But here’s where this deceptively simple breakup timeline gets messy. On Saturday night, Offset interrupted Cardi B’s performance at California’s Rolling Loud Festival by sending a bouquet of flowers arranged to read “Take Me Back Cardi” to the stage before hopping up there to ask for her forgiveness. “I just want to tell you I’m sorry, babe,” he told the rapper, who quietly whispered to him before he was ushered off stage. Some felt that Offset’s apology was a selfish disruption in which he stole Cardi B’s moment as the festival’s first female headliner, but he later tweeted about his rationale for the gesture, saying, “All of my wrongs have been made public, i figure It’s only right that my apologies are made public too.”

This caused quite a stir among the Cardi B–Offset relationship truthers online, who ruffled Cardi’s feathers enough to get her to respond to the drama on Instagram Live. Fans insisted that she must have known about Offset’s onstage apology because her publicist Patience Foster was seen speaking with Offset before he joined the stage, but Cardi B insisted on the contrary. Cardi B then took to Instagram Live to ask everyone to keep her publicist’s name out of their mouths, whether they are fans of her or not. “Y’all not gonna come for the people that I fuck with and I rock with, and I consider family. Period,” the rapper said to her 37 million followers. “That’s why I don’t like this fame shit,” she went on, before praising Foster for being there for her since the early days of her career. “Let’s not forget that she got me my first magazine cover…let’s not forget that she got me a whole fucking stylist…Just because you don’t agree with a publicist’s move…you think I’m gonna let y’all drag her?” she asked. Both Cardi B and Offset share Foster as a publicist, so it is plausible that she just wanted to help out her client (Offset) with his apology, even if it backfired.

The festival’s cofounder Tariq Cherif also laid any conspiracies about the festival’s knowledge of the stunt to rest in an attempt to absolve Rolling Loud from any more backlash online. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he revealed that though they figured Migos would join the rapper onstage as a special guest during her performance, he “didn’t know anything about that stunt.” He added, “We’re getting blamed as if we conspired to do this, and I just want to make it clear that we did not. Cardi’s management was in on it, it had nothing to do with the festival. The artist is in full control of the stage and they determine who gets on and off,” he continued.

So what is the truth? Who knew about the apology stunt, and how did Offset think this would go over well? It is quite a curious case, but one thing can be sure: The only people who know what really goes down between Cardi B and Offset are Cardi B and Offset themselves.

Related: Cardi B Responds to Offset Interrupting Her Rolling Loud Set