‘Hopelessly in Love’: Were Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes and Tupac Shakur Soulmates? Fans Weigh In
Lifetime’s brand-new docuseries Hopelessly in Love builds on the success of Surviving R. Kelly and Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning, digging into celebrities’ tumultuous sexual and romantic pasts. Each episode will feature interviews with family and friends to paint a picture of what life was really like for some of Hollywood’s most notorious couples.
The first episode featured the complex, passionate love story of Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes of the iconic girl group TLC, who died in a tragic car accident in 2002, and Andre Rison, a former NFL player. Lopes was famously sentenced to five years of probation after she set Rison’s home on fire after an argument, but the couple reunited and planned to marry just before her untimely death.
Many fans were surprised to learn on Hopelessly in Love that one of the biggest conflicts in Lopes and Rison’s relationship was the connection between Lopes and the late rapper-revolutionary Tupac Shakur, who was murdered in 1996. Lopes’ friend even called Tupac her “soulmate.”
Rison claimed his relationship with Lopes changed in part because of Tupac
Rison told Hopelessly in Love producers he was always “deeply in love” with Lopes, but they both often felt jealousy. One night, which ended up being the first night she burned belongings in his home, Tupac was the source of that jealousy.
“She said she had a car picking her up as opposed to driving one of the cars,” Rison explained, which set off a red flag for him because they had a “fleet of cars outside.” “And something said, ‘Go look.’”
He continued, “Lo and behold, I went and looked, and when that back door opened, Pac was sitting in the back seat.”
But Lopes came home early that night, and that’s when everything changed. In an old interview with Lopes, she told her own version of the night, when she said something told her to go home and see what Rison was up to. When she arrived, she claimed he was “in the bathroom butt naked. I didn’t know he was gonna be up in the room with another woman.”
That wasn’t the first time Tupac’s connection with Lopes made Rison feel uneasy. At the 1996 Grammys, Lopes refused to go with Rison, who showed up alone. Tupac, meanwhile, was there as a presenter and nominee.
“I remember that Lisa had lied to me that night Tupac picked her up from my house, and I had heard rumors about her love for Pac,” Rison confessed. “And Tupac is my friend, and I’m just sitting there the whole time like, ‘Is it true or it ain’t true?’” That night, she allegedly left the Grammys party with the hip-hop icon.
Lopes’ friend said she and Tupac had a ‘strong connection’
Trena Smith, Lopes’ best friend, said Lopes and Tupac had something real and deep together. “I think that Andre knew how Lisa felt about Pac…They had this strong connection, and I do mean it was strong. They completed each other’s sentences,” she said on Hopelessly in Love. She even hinted that Lopes picked out all the details of Tupac’s home, just as she did for Rison.
Strangely enough, everyone in Lopes’ life maintained that she and the rapper were never sexually intimate. “That was a strange love story because she and Pac never slept together, and she and Andre were in a full-fledged relationship,” Smith said. While they slept in the same bed together occasionally, they apparently never had sex.
Reindrop Lopes, Lopes’ sister, agreed, saying: “I think Andre probably assumed that Lisa and Tupac slept together or had sex, but actually, Tupac told Lisa in the very beginning, ‘Never let me sleep with you.’ And they stood by that, so no, they never had sex.”
Smith even said Lopes and Tupac were “soulmates” who were destined for one another. “Lisa loved Andre. It was like Tupac was her soulmate,” she said on the docuseries. “They weren’t meant to be together on this earth. Andre had her heart but Tupac had her soul.”
Viewers were surprised by the revelation
Many Hopelessly in Love viewers were shocked to hear about the depth of Tupac’s relationship with Lopes. “Raise your hand if you don’t remember (or never knew) about this whole Tupac and Lisa relationship because WTF,” wrote one Twitter user during the episode. “I was today years old when I found out that Left Eye and Tupac dated,” another agreed.
Others wished the two incredible artists had gotten together for a creative collaboration before each of their tragic deaths. “Just thinking about Tupac and Lefteye and the possible magic they could’ve made on a album or even a few songs together has me shook,” one viewer wrote.
