Kevin Gates & Dreka's Relationship Timeline

Dreka Gates moves through the world like someone who knows where the roots are buried. Her hands stay in the soil, keeping rumors at bay as she operates a wellness farm. Then there’s Kevin Gates, forever orbiting between enlightenment and gut-wrenching honesty. Louisiana-born, self-mythologizing, deeply gifted, and often misunderstood. Together, they were a story that many thought would stretch for decades.

Yet, something changed. He started appearing alone, then with other women. She stopped standing next to him, but never said his name with malice. As his current relationship unfolds in TikTok-sized declarations and borrowed last names, the internet has begun to circle back to the woman who helped build the house he still lives in.

Behind every reinvention is someone who helped lay the original blueprint, and Dreka was never just the wife. She was a part of the beginning.

“Me and Kevin have been together 13, almost 14 years now,” Dreka Gates told The Source in 2016. That places the beginning of their relationship around 2002 or 2003. “When I first met him, he always wrote music, and he was always recording, but he was just doing it in a room in his grandmother’s house,” she said.

Their relationship turned into a working partnership when Kevin told her he wanted to become a professional artist. “I was like, ‘Seriously? Is this really something you want to do?’ He said, ‘Yes.’” She responded by researching the industry on her own terms. “I basically went out and read every book I could find. I went and talked to any and everyone that I could. Then again, people in the industry shut you out. So you really end up making your own path, which is what we did.”

Dreka started by watching other Baton Rouge artists and applying those lessons to Kevin’s career. “We pretty much just made our own path,” she said. “We started off so old school, just basically getting any and everyone that we could to hear his music. From then on, we started booking shows. I would go to promoters that I knew who booked other well-known artists and try to get Kevin on the stage.”

There was no team or label machinery. “Yet, all the while I learned any and everything I could learn about the industry on my own because nobody is just going to say, ‘Hey, come on let me show you the ropes!’ That’s just not going to happen.”

By the time they married in 2015, Dreka had already spent years managing the logistics of Kevin’s career while raising their family and navigating an industry that often shut her out. What they built started long before fame ever found them.

The Gates partnership presented a united front. They appeared together in music videos with images of intimacy and shared life woven into Kevin’s art. In 2023, Dreka starred in "Breakfast," set against a snowy landscape, in which the couple is portrayed as affectionate and warm. These were statements about their partnership in the public eye.

However, by the mid‑2020s, the texture of their story began to change. In Kevin’s 2022 track "Super General," listeners speculated on personal narratives layered into his verses. One line about a personal trainer “invading [his] personal space” sparked social media rumors that Dreka had crossed boundaries with someone she worked with.

Dreka addressed the speculation directly online, pushing back against that interpretation: “I HAVE to address this because it’s really gone a little too far and I don’t care for social media to continue to spread this misinformation.” She denied ever having a sexual or romantic encounter with a personal trainer or any "hired help."

Kevin’s own statements in the years that followed revealed the fracture behind the images. In an Instagram reel posted in January 2026, he claimed that their union “was not legally binding” and denied being a “deadbeat father” to their children. He asserted that Dreka had filed for divorce only after he stopped giving her money and accused her and her family of stealing from him. He challenged her to explain that their children had lived with him for the past two years. Then, in a turn of rhetoric that juxtaposed praise and vitriol, he said, “You are a goddess. You’re just a goddess of manipulation and darkness.”

The divorce itself was finalized in 2025, after ten years of marriage. During the process, Kevin was briefly linked to Brittany Renner. That relationship, however, did not last, even though they claimed to be married. Meanwhile, Kevin’s current relationship with Jelenny Tejada, using the TikTok handle “Jelenny Gates,” has become the newest chapter.

Even amid all this, Dreka has continued to shape her own life beyond the controversy. She owns and operates a reported 43‑acre farm in Mississippi, and she has pursued entrepreneurial ventures, including BE Provisions, a cannabis shop with multiple Michigan locations that focuses on education and positive community impact. She also runs her eponymous skincare company, which she built “to promote whole body wellness, so you can look and feel your best IRL.”

As the public followed the dissolution of Kevin and Dreka, his romances began to take center stage. One of the most visible was Kevin’s connection to Brittany Renner, which surprised fans given her new, more conservative look with modest clothing and a hijab. During the period when Kevin and Dreka’s marriage was ending, social media and tabloids circulated claims of an alleged Nikah marriage between Kevin and Renner. That union was short‑lived and never established as a legally binding marriage in the way Dreka’s and Kevin’s had been.

More recently, Renner returned with a few scathing words for Gates after he appeared in an interview with Club Shay Shay. She's unleashed on her former lover, claiming they are no longer friends, and it doesn't look like any love has been lost between these two.

Kevin’s romances would change once again. On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, a new name began to appear in connection with him: 26-year-old Jelenny Tejada. Unlike the stylized speculation around Renner, Jelenny’s relationship with Kevin is present in the digital world where partners appear in tagged posts, shared clips, and algorithmic attention.

Ten years of marriage and nearly two decades of connection. A label built from scratch and a partnership that existed before the public cared. Now, it's one that audiences continues to recount long after it’s ended.

The relationship between Kevin and Dreka Gates has become a lens for how celebrity unions are observed. What started as a bond between two people has been reduced, online, to accusations, screen grabs, and Instagram declarations. Still, beyond the noise are the facts that they built a family, a business, and a brand. Now, they are living apart from that structure.

The commentary may continue, and the relationship may be over, but what remains is what each of them built during it. The real-life structures behind the scenes. That part doesn't disappear.