Jeff Pearlman’s Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur is a tutorial on the power of layered stories and dogged research in creating full-bodied protagonists and nuance. Even 29 years after Tupac Shakur was killed, his cultural footprint is massive, and even with all of the documentaries, films, books, and thinkpieces about him that have come in subsequent years, Jeff’s book stands tall with its panoramic view of a man shaped by his era, his mother, an activist bloodline, his disparate schooling, his sensitivities, and his competing impulses.
I spoke with Jeff about his 650+ interviews for the book, why he doesn’t think the number should be that remarkable, the beautiful reunion engendered by the book’s research, New York City, Baltimore, Marin City, and other homes for Tupac and their indelible impact on the man, as well as Tupac’s indelible impact on these places and their people, Tupac as a man of multitudes, and reality versus perception in the way he lived his life and has been and will be remembered.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Pete Riehl
The intro [to the book has you] at a Starbucks in Las Vegas, one tenth of a mile from where Tupac was killed, and you’re talking to Davonn Hodge, from “Brenda’s Got a Baby.” How did you link [mother and son, as referenced in the Tupac song, where the twelve-year-old mother abandoned her baby]?
Jeff Pearlman
I give my genealogist Michele the most credit-Michele Soulli, a product [like Jeff] of Mahopac High School. She helped me find Davonn.
I think [the impetus was] the journalistic background and the Sports Illustrated background, which was always “find the different story, find something that no one else has found.” When I was at Sports Illustrated, especially covering baseball, you’d come into a town and all the writers, if you’re doing a Derek Jeter piece where all the writers know Derek Jeter very well, made it so that you had to come in and look at things differently and try to find some approach or angle or something. So with “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” it really was to me, “All right. What’s different? What can I find that’s different? What totally is outside the box?”
I knew from an Omar Epps interview that Tupac had read a Daily News article about this 12 year-old girl raped by a cousin, gives birth to the baby, throws the baby away, and I knew there was an article out there. So I found the article, reached out to my genealogist, Michelle, and said it would be amazing if we could find this baby. She’s the best [researcher] I’ve ever worked with, and she came back a few days later and had this number for a guy she was pretty sure was Davonn Hodge. We wound up ultimately reuniting him and the mother who threw him down the trash heap. It’s crazy.
Pete Riehl
Oh my gosh, congratulations on that. That’s so cool. You are known for long form, and interview after interview. You said almost 700 [interviews for the book. Do you have an exact number?
Jeff Pearlman
652 is the number.
Pete Riehl
That is incredible.
Jeff Pearlman
But you know what? I’m going to say something, and I’m not being humble.
Like, what are you supposed to do? You’re writing about some iconic figure. You’re digging into his life. You have three years to do it.
You’re going to call everybody. I almost think you’re supposed to do that. It’s the one thing I can control. There are better writers than me. There are better reporters than me.
There are people who are better at digging through FOIA requests, but I can call 650 people. The one thing you can control is how hard you work, and I’m almost amazed sometimes how [the number of interviews] surprises people.
I like being known as a guy who calls people, sure, but I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t you call people if you have a biography? If the yearbooks are all easily accessible, you can find the yearbooks. Nowadays, with modern technology, it’s not hard to find people-99% of us have a Facebook page or an Instagram account, right? Why wouldn’t you reach out to all those people?
Pete Riehl
The epigraph is from Set Shakur, Tupac’s sister, about his burdens and that he died alone. I think of how we look at our heroes, and how Tupac was only 25 when he was killed. We think of him as he was-incredibly good looking, the son of a Black Panther with that connection, so cool, so much charisma. He’d now be in his mid 50s, 54 right now. He’d probably have a beer belly, he might be going gray. I wonder about this idea of dying alone in relation to him being so vaunted and almost deified.
Jeff Pearlman
I think in a lot of ways people misunderstand the isolation of fame. I think there’s this perception that every day is a great time and [celebrities are] on top of the world and everyone loves [them], and the truth of the matter is that what oftentimes comes with fame is isolation, and a mistrust of people’s intentions-with good reason.
People always have a hand out, a lot of people pretending they’re your best friend, pretending they know you, pretending they understand you, pretending they love you-a lot of disposable people, a lot of disposable sex, a lot of disposable purchases.
At the end of his life, how many people were truly, truly, truly, truly close to Tupac? A very small handful. There’s a lot of hangers on. A lot of people just used him and asked him for stuff and I think his sister was right. I think he lived a pretty lonely life in a lot of ways.
Pete Riehl
Baltimore and Marin City, CA, were such instructive periods of Tupac’s life.
Jeff Pearlman
Baltimore and Marin City are the two periods of his life where you really understand how he became who he wound up becoming.
Pete Riehl
That image that you paint of Tupac being so upset by his mom’s [drug] addiction, but that he was also kicking it with the same guys who sold to her in Marin City.
Jeff Pearlman
It’s crazy. You’re like 18, 19 years old, you’re a senior in high school. It’s actually very similar to Baltimore. Every day you come back home to Marin City and you’re not living with your mom, but you see her and she’s a crack addict, wandering or shuffling around Marin City in this crack stupor.
Every day you take the bus to your beautiful, beautiful high school in a town where Huey Lewis and Bonnie Raitt live, where you can buy different kinds of chai and cappuccino and espresso and all this stuff. Every day you’re in this glorious world where you’re this artistic phenomenon and you’re part of the program at this school, Mt. Tamalpais High School, where they produce actors and you’re this thespian, and then every day you go back home at the end of the day and you’re back surrounded by the crack world of Marin City. It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy thing to go through.
Pete Riehl
[During his days at BSA-Baltimore School for the Arts] Tupac said to his drama teacher, “You have no idea what I go through to get here.” He was referring to how he got to the play, to the school, even, on a daily basis. He was a shapeshifter. He lived across the street from what was like the “other side of the tracks” when you talked about Baltimore neighborhoods, with his area being much more impoverished. I wonder about that shapeshifter idea of him in school.
Jeff Pearlman
I understand why you ask it, and it’s a fair question-”shapeshifter”: I think the phrasing implies, like, “full of crap.” I don’t think he was full of crap. I think we all do this, right?
Pete Riehl
We contain multitudes.
Jeff Pearlman
We all do. The waiter who you go to at the restaurant, the waiter at the fancy restaurant who’s like, “Thank you for dining with us. It’s a pleasure to be serving you tonight. Oh, the asparagus is our best, blah, blah, blah.”
But that person goes home and is really pissed off about his kid peeing on the carpet, and then he goes to his day job. He has a second job working at auto, changing tires. We all adjust, we all adjust to our surroundings.
So around the white older teacher, Mrs. Greenleaf, in elementary school, Tupac is this kind of endearing child who knows what she’s expecting, and he speaks in “proper English,” which he totally could and did and didn’t mind, and it was very normal to him. Then he’s hanging out with his buddies in Marin City and they’re talking. They love hip hop, and they’re dropping lines and talking about this and talking about that and a totally different way and really in a totally different dialect. Then he goes somewhere else…you just do what you have to do.
I think if you meet a lot of people, in particular Black people in this country who are also immersed in this white world where there are expectations that you behave a certain way and then you go back home, you’re not the same way because people place expectations on you.
Pete Riehl
You write that “the mystique of [Tupac] is not part of his story-it is his story.” We talk about him being 54 years old now, maybe with a beer belly, and this idea of young people and all the crazy things that they do, and how he might just be a boring 54 year-old right now.
Jeff Pearlman
I don’t think he’d be boring, though. I’m very reluctant to people say, “What would he be doing today?” I don’t know, right?
Living out here in Southern California and I can’t say I know, but I believe strongly.
Tupac at 54 wouldn’t just be like, “Oh, there are ICE agents grabbing brown people off the street. That’s cool. I’m just going to sit back in my mansion and watch TV.”
I just don’t see it.
I had a revelation talking to my son, a sophomore in college and a big hip hop guy, recently, and I was telling him my disappointment over guys like Snoop and Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, as the ICE raids are going on and you hear not a peep from them. We’re talking about Tupac and the thing that’s different between those guys and Tupac: their hip hop was storytelling-”When I was a kid, the police,” etc.
Tupac, however, was truly raised by a person all about action. It wasn’t just telling stories, it was personifying and bringing forth and trying to fight for change and trying to make a difference. It’s hard for me to picture Tupac watching this all go on. It’s very easy for me to picture Tupac being out there in their faces, saying, “Why are you wearing a mask, why are you wearing a mask?”
I don’t know, maybe it just would have been 25 year old Tupac. It’s hard for me not to picture him out there at least doing something.
This interview is excerpted from Episode 308 of the Chills at Will Podcast. Listen to the complete conversation here.
NONFICTION
Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur
By Jeff Pearlman
Mariner Books
Published October 21, 2025
