“No hit it hard. You want the tape. Massive scoop.”

It was Oct. 14, 2016. The email was in my inbox from Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, after I’d gone to him saying that I was hearing rumors circulating in reporters’ circles and in the broader culture: That there might be a video or audio recording of Trump saying some variation of “nigger.” Ben was right; if it existed, I wanted to find it.

I just...didn’t know what I was going after. Was the alleged video taken during the taping of The Apprentice? Or was it something else? I quickly learned that black Republican operatives who supported Trump were talking about this tape as A Problem. Have you heard it? Do you know someone who has? Have you spoken to Trump officials about its existence? Does Trump know this tape is out there? This went on for two days, but I just wasn’t getting very far at all. I knew, but was unable to report, what we all know now: It was being discussed at the highest levels of the Trump campaign. We didn't — and don’t — know if it existed.

I did get a tip, however. Someone told me they were told that a tape existed that featured Trump saying something; this alleged tape involved another celebrity and, whoever they were, the celebrity was in hip-hop. I had covered music for Ebony and the business of music for Black Enterprise. From all of those nights of Cîroc I spent trying to get scoops and invites to more parties, I built quite a rolodex of people who had worked in music in New York forever. And maybe one of them knew that Trump had thrown around a word like that. Was it his nature? Would it have been acceptable? For the next two days, I asked.

I decided to focus in particular on three figures in hip-hop who I knew had been around Trump: Andre Harrell, his protégé Diddy, and Russell Simmons. My recollection is that, through spokespeople, Diddy and Harrell immediately said no and did not want to be interviewed about it. Simmons was interesting to me — I just knew somehow that he had a penchant for saying “nigga”...a lot. Unlike Diddy and Harrell, Simmons talked to me on the phone for about 20 minutes, based on my notes of the call. (This was all before serious allegations of sexual assault arose, which he has denied.) According to my notes, he talked about the fact that he had been friendly with Trump in the past — but it wasn't like they were hanging out every night back then. In 2016, Simmons wanted to be clear, he unequivocally supported Hillary Clinton. Most of all, he said, it would not have been cool, not just for Trump but for anyone white, to use that around him or his peers at the time.

The reason I’d known Simmons and others knew Trump was a 1999 Vibe story about how Trump had been a popular figure in New York, venerated ostensibly in hip-hop for his significant wealth and record in business. He was down.

In the story, one observer of this particular phenomenon told Vibe that Trump had a “ghetto pass.”