‘Biggest blessing’: Keke Palmer reveals she’s pregnant during SNL monologue

The actor said she had been ‘trying to keep it on the downlow’

Kate Ng
Sunday 04 December 2022 11:18 GMT
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Keke Palmer does celebrity impressions on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon

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Keke Palmer has revealed that she is pregnant with her first child with boyfriend Darius Jackson.

The 29-year-old made the announcement during her hosting debut on Saturday Night Live on 3 December.

Palmer, who has kept her love life with Jackson mostly private, delivered her big news by first addressing rumours that she was expecting.

“There’s some rumours going around, people have been in my comments saying, ‘Keke’s having a baby, Keke’s pregnant’ and I want to set the record straight,” she began, before ripping open the long gray jacket she wore onstage and declaring: “I am!”

She posed with her exposed growing belly as the audience cheered before covering up again and continuing: “I gotta say though, it is bad when people on the internet spread rumours about you ya’ll, but it’s even worse when they’re correct.

“I mean, like, I was trying so hard to keep it on the downlow, ‘cause I got stuff going on, you know? But honestly, this has been the biggest blessing and I am so excited. Guys, I’m going to be a mum.”

The Nope star added: “Even though some people feel a little weird about me having a baby because I was a child actor. I just wanna say, look, I’m 29, I’m grown, I have sex, I own a home, I stormed the Capitol on 6 January, you know? Things adults do.”

It is believed that Palmer and Jackson have been dating for a year and a half and first met at a Memorial Day party in May 2021.

Although Palmer previously went “Instagram official” with Jackson by posting some photographs of them together on her social media page, she has since deleted all the images.

(Saturday Night Live)

However, when she first began posting about him, she told The Tamron Hall Show last November that she did so because “it became more difficult to hide” that she was in a relationship.

“We spend all this time together, and he really is my closest friend, so it just becomes a thing where I’m not going to hide something that makes me happy,” she said.

“It’s not going to be everything you see, my job is my job, but at the end of the day this is somebody that is important to me, so why not?”

Last month, in an episode of her podcast Baby, This is Keke Palmer, the Hustlers star opened up about her relationship with sex.

She said her “identity” when it came to sex used to see it as a “service”, but it was “depressing and not enough”.

The best advice Palmer said she ever received about sex came from Whoopi Goldberg, who told her during an appearance on The View to “start with pleasing yourself”.

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