Rapper T.I. Recalls the Time He Saved Scott Stapp Following Suicide Attempt
It's well-known that several years ago, Scott Stapp was saved by rapper T.I. after the Creed singer attempted to take his life by jumping off the balcony of his hotel room in Miami, Fla. But while the former has detailed the incident at length, most notably in his 2012 memoir Sinner's Creed, T.I. hasn't talked that much about it.
Now, in a new interview with GQ, the rapper and actor discussed that fateful night in 2006, revealing that he was able to prevent Stapp from jumping to his death, coaxing the singer to allow him to contact the authorities by offering him a hit off a joint.
"I was outside in Miami, at the Shore Club, and I was stepping outside my balcony, about to fire up my blunt, me and my partner Big Phil," T.I. says. "I just heard moaning and groaning from up on top of the roof area. I'm looking at Phil and I'm like, 'Are you hungry?' I thought it was his stomach because Phil was always hungry. And he was like, 'Man, that ain't me.' And we continue to smoke, and then [moaning sound]. So I step out and look down and don't see nothing. And then I look up and - 'Oh shit, it's a white man up there!' [laughs] That's what really shocked me. Blood shows up real good on a white man."
"So I'm like, 'He's bloody, fucked up,'" T.I. continues. "And he's like, 'Those motherfuckers, I'ma get 'em, I'ma get 'em.' And he tried to get up and he fell back down. Clearly, his leg was broken or something. And he told us the story about how he thought his girlfriend was cheating on him with his best friend. He tried to jump from 14 - and I think we were probably the sixth floor, something like that. And he was trying to continue to jump. And we was like, 'No, no, no. Don't do that.' So basically, I offered him the J, but he couldn't reach me. So I said, 'I tell you what, I'll let you hit it if you let me call somebody to get you down.' So he let us call somebody to get him down. And I didn’t know it, but that was Scott Stapp from Creed."
In separate interviews, T.I. has said that he didn't find out it was Stapp until about a week later. Stapp said the two of them had met previously when they were both working on songs for the soundtrack to the 2004 film The Passion of the Christ and bonded over a shared love of Alabama football.
"We'd talked about being fans of Alabama [Crimson Tide]..." Stapp told VH1 in 2012. "He came out, and as I'm laying on the ledge, blood fell to his feet and he looked up and he had an Alabama hat on. I said, 'Roll tide,' and then he looked at me and put two and two together and really saved my life."
Scott Stapp Plays 'Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction?'