Fantasia Barrino has been wowing her fans for 20 years, ever since winning American Idol! at only 19 years old. The star has gone on to do a great deal in the last two decades, including winning a Grammy. She also performed on Broadway in The Color Purple as the show’s star, Celie, before going on to reprise her role for the film adaptation.
Within all of that career success, Barrino has found time to develop her personal life as well. The singer is a mom of three and wife to her husband, Kendall Taylor. Here’s everything to know about the singer’s partner behind-the-scenes.
Who is Kendall Taylor?
Taylor was born and raised in Gastonia, North Carolina, the same state from which his wife hails. He is the CEO of Salute 1st, a group that offers mentorship programs to young men. In his CEO bio, he talks pretty openly about his life before becoming an entrepreneur, writing that with “no positive male influences present” as a child, he “found himself deep in the underworld of crime, drugs, and violence.”
His first child Trey was born when he was 15 years old, and he notes that his son’s birth coincided with the year of his first arrest. Around 2007, in his late 20s, Taylor says he started turning his life around and got a job at a warehouse, while also working to overcome three felony charges. He eventually launched his first company, Courier Logix, which then merged with Metro Transportation Services. Taylor went on to make quite a bit of money as a stakeholder.
He and Barrino have embarked on their own projects, co-starting entertainment firm Rock Soul Entertainment. In 2022, they also co-wrote a relationship book called No Crowns in the Castle.
And he has an honorary doctorate from Texas Seminary Christian University, which Barrino celebrated on Instagram in May 2023.
How did Barrino and Taylor meet?
In a 2019 Breakfast Club interview, Barrino said they met at a “rooftop spot” in 2015 and that they were “friends first,” but it sounds like the romantic spark was there immediately, too.
“Never did he ever try to come on to me,” she said, according to Nicki Swift. “It was just great conversation. I knew he was my dude. He became my boyfriend that night.”
After three weeks, they got married in a courthouse.
“He was like ‘What’s good? I was like what you want to do? He was like, ‘let’s do it.’ We went and got married at the courthouse. None of y’all knew. The world didn’t know,” she said.
They had a second wedding on a yacht in July of that year, per The Hollywood Reporter.
What has Barrino said about her husband?
In an interview with ELLE, she stated, “He treats me like a queen. He tells me I’m a queen every day. It’s not a day I don’t wake up to him saying, ‘Good morning, beautiful.’ I wasn’t quite used to it. It made me feel very, very uncomfortable in the beginning. But he has reminded me of who I was. I was broken. It wasn’t until I met my husband and I started becoming a woman that sat back and realized that everything I went through was necessary. ”
She continued, “I started to learn how to play chess, not checkers. I started to realize that the business is the business. Kendall, he’s pretty dope. I didn’t think I was going to have that because I didn’t think I deserved it. But remember, I told you I didn’t love myself. When I started to love on myself, I was like, girl, yeah, you deserve, you deserve, you deserve.”
Do Barrino and Taylor have children?
In addition to Taylor’s son, Trey, Barrino has two sons from previous relationships, Dallas Xavier and Zion Quari. They added to their blended family in 2021, welcoming their daughter Keziah Taylor.
In an interview with Tamron Hall in 2020, she discussed the three-year-long fertility journey the couple went through to conceive Keziah.
“I kid you not, I forgot about it,” she said. “And then I woke up one night, and I was just like, ‘Something’s different.’”
Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.