Kanye West Opens up About Previous Addiction to Pornography, Mental Health Struggles

Rapper Kanye West opened up about his previous addiction to porn and the lasting effect it had on him.

XXL Magazine reports that West was five-years-old when he first saw a Playboy magazine.

"My dad had a Playboy left out at age five and it's affected almost every choice I made for the rest of my life. From age five till now having to kick the habit, West said.

During an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music's Beat's 1 Radio, West explained that after viewing Playboy, his obsession with porn began to take shape.

"Like for me Playboy was my gateway into full-on pornography addiction," he explained. 

Also, West believes that sex trafficking can happen in many forms.

"It just presents itself in the open like it's OK and I stand up and say, 'No it's not OK. When you see all of the billboards, the traffic billboards. When I say 'traffic' I'm talking about the billboards are actually sex trafficking," West said.

"On one side of the street it's a billboard with spirits, which is alcohol, and on the other side it's 'call this number' or it's a picture of a woman on a billboard and says 'Come to this strip club.' So there are all different layers of trafficking."

The music artist also discussed his battle with mental health and how the style of his music is changing.

While making his new album, Jesus is King, West asked people who were working with him to refrain from premarital sex.

"Now, I'm letting you know what Jesus has done for me and in that, I'm no longer a slave. I'm a son now, a son of God - I'm free," he noted. 

West said his life was changed after he was hospitalized in 2016.  

"A person came to my house that wasn't a Christian and told me to come over and thirty minutes later I was in handcuffs, headed to the hospital," he recalled. 

"This person may have saved my life because when you're in an episode you can jump off the side of a balcony or stab your eye out. You can do a lot of things when you're ramped up like that," West added. " But one of the things that people do now is they try to discriminate against my mind and my thoughts because of that moment."

"The most space I had to think is when I went to the hospital. I started reading the Bible and I started writing out bible verses," he explained. 

West's new album 'Jesus is King' was released Friday and features West's gospel-rap group, Sunday Service. 

"JESUS IS KING"
Midnight pic.twitter.com/EMYldzBXCU

— ye (@kanyewest) October 24, 2019