Tashera Simmons on DMX and Karrine Steffans

According to Vibe magazine, Tashera Simmons, 34, first ran into DMX when she was 10 years old and he was 11. Raised in Yonkers, N.Y., in a strict Muslim household, she was not allowed outside except to go to school. On a rare, unsupervised trip to the store one day, she says she watched as Earl Simmons, her future husband, robbed an old woman. “I knew he was bad,” says Tashera. “But I’d never had any excitement in my life, so he was like my hero. I used to think about him all the time after that day.” Eight years later a mutual friend introduced her to Simmons at a party, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Asked about DMX’s well-chronicled drug issues, Tashera chooses her words carefully. “It’s not like they say in the papers,” she professes. “He has more of a drinking problem than drugs.” In addition to his well publicized traffic violations, he’s had several run-ins with the law, including a case in 2004 when he reportedly impersonated a federal agent in a failed car-theft attempt at JFK airport. “He just has a road rage problem,” she insists. (Tashera’s apparently got a lead foot too: Earlier this year she was charged with speeding, driving an unregistered vehicle, and not using child restraints on her four kids in upstate New York.)

As for their love life, she frankly admits that she believes her husband has cheated on her. “I don’t think he’s out there being faithful,” Tashera says. “I hope he is. But I wouldn’t put it past him.” In 2004 a woman named Monique Wayne claimed that DMX fathered her son after she met the rapper in a nightclub, reports say. A paternity test and court order later, he began paying $5,000 a month in child support. “Truthfully, I wouldn’t let that break our family up,” Tashera says. She crosses her fingers. “We’re tight. All I know is that whatever he does, at the end of the day it’s all about me.”

Connecting over having similarly dysfunctional families, Tashera and DMX cemented their me-and-you-against-the-world bond while they were still teenagers. She says that’s one reason they’ve lasted through so much. “It’s our background that keeps me strong,” she says. “If I’d just gotten in the relationship and I heard about babies and Superhead, I wouldn’t be here.” Tashera was being chauffeured to a hair salon when she first heard about Steffans book ‘Confessions of a Video Vixen’. The driver mentioned the name Superhead several times and hinted that Tashera should know who the woman was. “I didn’t know who she was talking about,” she says. The chauffeur handed over the book and turned to the page in which Steffans described a sexual relationship with DMX. Outraged, Tashera says she clocked the driver in the head with the book. After confronting her husband, he told her he didn’t remember Steffans. “I was more mad about the way I found out than anything else,” says Tashera. “Truthfully, it doesn’t matter. Everything in that book she could have got from watching MTV’s Diary. She said he growled when they were having sex. He ain’t never growled with me. Maybe he had a one-night stand with her and she took it somewhere else.”