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BET VP Tells Why Trina and Nicki Minaj are Not on Awards List

*After BET released its list of nominees for this year’s award ceremony last week, fans and celebrities were enraged because some names seemed to have been missing.

Twitter got a mouth full of comments, complaints, and snide remarks especially for seeing names no one has ever heard of in categories made for the kings and queens of the industry.

In the wake of the backlash, VP of entertainment and music programming, Stephen Hill, shared some things about the nominee list.

Why wasn’t Trina nominated in the Female Hip Hop category?

Okay, that was because Trina didn’t submit a video that was in during the eligibility period. Let me back up. To be eligible, here’s what you have to have: a video that’s submitted and then first played on BET…between April 1 of one year and March 30 of the next year. So for this eligibility period it would be April 1 of 2010 to March 30 of 2011. She did not release a video to us in that time. “Million Dollar Girl” came in March. I think it was March 12 or so of 2010. And so she was in last year’s nominees for that. While she was featured in Lola Monroe’s video, the rules are you have to release a video of your own. You have to be the primary artist on it. You can’t be just the feature artist and be eligible. So that’s why Lola Monroe was eligible but Trina was not for this year because it came out this year.

So I’ve reached out to her camp. I’ve talked to the head of her label. And actually the only reason I might get off this call is because I may be getting a call from Trina while this call is going on. If she calls you just go ahead and jump off.

And I want to be clear: We love Trina, we work with Trina. She performed “Million Dollar Girl” on Rip the Runway in February of 2010. So we love Trina. We definitely understand that it’s a misunderstanding. And I’ll tell you now, if I were Trina and I’d released something during the eligibility period and it had not been nominated, I probably would’ve had a little bit of side-eye too. But the truth is she just wasn’t in the eligibility period.

Trina wasn’t the only one throwing the side-eye. Diamond shouted her out on Twitter, and even Nicki Minaj criticized the nominees. Does that concern you at all?

No, no, honestly. Because they were all operating off of false information basically. They all believed that Trina was eligible to be nominated. I love that. They were supporting each other. Far too many times in hip hop people want to tear each other down or not support each other. So even though it was at our expense, you have all these women supporting each other in the hip hop field. So hopefully people will feel better once the truth comes out, once they realize that there was no eligibility there. But absent that, if them not knowing the rules fostered some camaraderie, I’m all in.