Joe Budden, Joell Ortiz, KXNG Crooked, and Royce Da 5’9 formed Slaughterhouse in 2008 and dropped two studio albums as a group. Their self-titled debut was released in 2009, and Welcome To: Our House came out three years later. In April 2018, KXNG Crooked announced via Instagram he was leaving Slaughterhouse, insisting there were no hard feelings between himself and the group, suggesting it was “all love.”

Slaughterhouse has been a topic of contention in recent weeks after Crooked and Ortiz announced a new project called The Rise And Fall Of Slaughterhouse, a follow-up to 2020’s H.A.R.D. EP. Both former members Royce and Budden immediately showed their disapproval of the project, with the podcast host writing a simple “SMH” in Royce’s post about it. 

During a recent episode of The Bootleg Kev Podcast, Crooked opened up about the group’s demise and argued Royce wasn’t being honest about what happened between them.

“Put yourself in the fans' shoes for a minute,” he says in the clip. “You’ve been waiting on one of your favorite groups in the world to drop an album for 10 years. Now behind the scenes, I’ve been taking flights to New York, go talk to Paul Rosenberg. I’ve been taking flights to Detroit, talking to Em, talking to Royce, how can we put this back together? It’s not happened in 10 years. So you’re telling me you want me to wait again, and then I saw something where Royce said that we weren’t waiting on anybody… that’s a lie.”

“So I need to address all this stuff because whenever they say that, I just come back with the truth. You can attack my character, my integrity, you could try to assassinate it and say that I’m a liar and I’m doing this for money and all that shit.”

KXNG Crooked also suggested Budden was to blame for the group not dropping music for so long, explaining he was already signed to another label when Slaughterhouse got their deal with Shady Records.

“Joe was signed to another label and caught up in some paperwork. They called over to Shady like, ‘Hey, we have him under contract, you have to get a clearance from us to have him appear on the song.’ All of us supposedly free agents to sign this deal with Shady, and come to find out Joe was on the paperwork, he said that they forged his signature and that wasn’t him. The group was put on the shelf for a minute while he was fighting amalgam digital label in court, and we were waiting on Joe because we couldn’t move forward, and that took months.”

What do you think about Slaughterhouse’s ongoing feud with each other? Are KXNG Crooked and Joel Ortiz in the wrong? Stay tuned for more on this and other hip-hop news.