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Looking from the outside in, rapper Fabolous and his longtime partner, Emily B, seem to be in a great place. They are more public as a unit than ever before, and there are very few pictures that the former Love and Hip Hop star can post of herself that Fab isn’t commenting on and drooling over on Instagram.

As sweet as that would be in most everyday scenarios, some are still left skeptical when you consider that just last year, he was arrested and charged for domestic violence against her. As the stories went, he knocked some of her teeth out according to law enforcement sources, and was seen on video arguing with her father and approaching a frightened Emily with a weapon in his hand. Earlier this year though, he was able to get a plea deal and avoid going to jail, completing a pre-trial intervention program, which is not the same thing as anger management or therapy.

He talked about the situation for the very first time publicly on Hot 97’s Ebro in the Morning this week, with the host approaching the topic by saying, “Your off-season was rough.” Initially, the 42-year-old “Make Me Better” rapper downplayed that description of things.

“Yeah, I mean rough,” he said, “but not like — just little personal sh-t that you go through.”

He did however change his tune a bit when he talked about the difficulty of having to deal with the situation in front of the public. The MC admitted that after more than after 20 years of being private, it was a lot to handle.

“Yeah, that was different for me because I’m just more to myself and more like, even with my family and my personal life, it’s usually handled inside,” he said. “It’s not really a public opinions and comments and family members involved, them reacting to everything that’s coming in, too.”

“We just had to deal with it internally. It wasn’t about dealing with it publicly. That’s where I put my energy and focus into, dealing with it internally,” he added. “Publicly, everyone’s going to have their opinions, there’s going to be speculation. ‘Oh what really happened?’ But the clarity I was looking for was inside more than anything, because that’s the people I have to deal with every day. Those are the people that I care about, that I love, that I want to make sure they are clear on what’s going on. So that’s what I focused on. I didn’t really focus on what was going on with the outside. I knew a lot was spiraling, you know, it’s a story…it’s something that people want to know what’s going on. But at the same time, it wasn’t my job to just worry about them more than my people.”

And while the reports of what happened were one thing, the video of him losing his cool on Emily and her family outside their home, which featured the cries of children from inside the residence where the incident was taped, caused him to be seen in a whole different light, particularly by women fans. Again, he said work just had to be done between he and his family to move forward.

“Internally I just really, looking at the video is different from being inside of it,” he said. “From the video point it looks crazy so I just had to, internally, we knew what was going on in that. I’m not going to speak and pull it out to be a story for more — I don’t even really like engaging in it without even Emily being involved. It’s not a thing where I’m trying to excuse myself or anything of that nature. It really was more of an internal thing with us just going through the motion of what was happening, our emotions, it could have been a lot of things that was building up within our relationship, within our family, and I just dealt with those things. It wasn’t about the video or who put out the video and different things of that nature, it was more about us getting back to the place that we needed to be.”

Yet Fabolous understands that there are people who were and still are disappointed in the behavior he displayed. When asked what he would say to those disturbed by what they saw and heard, he offered an apology, but not an admission of anything specific.

“I apologize for coming across in a light that I wouldn’t want to be represented in,” he said. “People make their opinions and it’s hard to, after the fact, change somebody’s opinion on seeing a video of something because people still see with their own eyes and they just make their own judgment. All I could really do is apologize for being in a light that was not showing me in my best self, and that’s it.”

The conversation begins around the seven-minute mark below:

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