Nicki Minaj’s Husband, Kenneth Petty, Sentenced To House Arrest After Failing To Register As A Sex Offender

Kenneth Petty, the new husband of Nicki Minaj, has received three years of probation and must serve one year under house arrest for failing to register as a sex offender when they moved to California.

Petty, 44, assaulted Jennifer Hough in 1994 when they were both 16, and he was convicted of first-degree attempted rape the following year. He served four years in prison for the crime. When Petty married Minaj in 2019, she downplayed the incident to her fans when they brought up his sex offender status to her.

“He was 15, she was 16, in a relationship, but go awf (sic) internet. Y’all can’t run my life,” Minaj tweeted. Hough has denied this claim, and also accused Minaj and Petty of attempting to bribe and intimidate her into retracting her claim.

Hough filed suit against the rapper and Petty in New York last year seeking $500,000 but dropped Minaj from the suit this past January. Her lawyer claims they are just re-filing the charges in California, and no further updates have come from that process yet.

Petty was arrested in 2020 for failing to transfer his sex offender status from New York to California five days after moving. He entered a plea bargain and officially admitted to the crime in September 2021.

Along with the year of house arrest, Petty will also pay a $55,000 fine. The prosecution argued that 15 months of jail time was a better sentence, as Petty will be residing in his California mansion through house arrest, but the California federal judge didn’t seem to agree.